If you're looking for a simple-minded farce with campy overtones, this 2008 feature might be your dish.

Whitaker directed this flaccid romance from a script by girl-power hacks Jessica Bendinger.

As the phlegmatic, beer-guzzling protagonist, Will Ferrell manages to keep this rolling, though Rush's corny narrative devices (each of the minor characters receives an ironic gift at the end) couldn't be less consistent with Carver's stubborn minimalism.

I never thought I'd see a slapstick animal action movie about the beauty of interracial relationships and nonmarital sex, but that's what this is, and kids seem to love it.

Nothing much is original in this soggy tale of two German women whose friendship persists despite adversity and their own bad choices.

Garish and goopy—a kind of West Side Story reworked into its original form.

Makavejev's ripping political/scatological wit isn't much in evidence, and the long middle section—involving Roberts's efforts to close down independent bottler Bill Kerr—is soggy and too familiar, but the film lives in a hundred different eccentric details and niceties of execution.

Director Jacques-Remy Girerd often divides the frame into three vertical bands, each with a different color signature; this dynamic technique makes the eventual introduction of explosive action sequences seem like overkill.

Rises only slightly above the level of a Harlequin romance.

I'm qualified to report that this piece of junk faithfully re-creates the Hanna-Barbera formula of scary monsters, flimsy mystery, and watery comedy.

As a movie genre, the ghostly romantic comedy dates back at least as far as "Topper" (1937), and the stale premise, combined with the leads' typecasting, makes for an eminently forgettable date movie.

Another chapter in the ongoing struggle between the talented Mike Figgis (Stormy Monday, Internal Affairs, Liebestraum) and studio recutters and reshooters, this intriguing but unsatisfying love story between a manic-depressive (Richard Gere at his best) and his sympathetic therapist (Lena Olin) makes memorable uses of both its west-coast settings and its cast (which also includes Anne Bancroft), but, like Liebestraum, it seems to come to us with several parts missing.

I suspect an account of all the complex business transactions would be more fun than anything in the movie, where you can't see a blue sky that isn't made up to resemble the Dreamworks logo.

Unfortunately, Harold Becker's direction seems deliberately designed to pull the material toward the bland and conventional—toward easy payoffs and Rocky-style inspirational melodrama.

Predictably adolescent and smarmy, with the mix of sentimentality and cynical flippancy that's becoming Steven Soderbergh's specialty (even when he's pretending to make art films), this is chewing gum for the eyes and ears, and not bad as such.

Ralph Bakshi gathered retired animators from all over the world to work on his 1972 film, misleadingly billed as the first feature-length cartoon for adults. The results, inevitably, were disappointing; Bakshi just didn't have the money to make it right.

The humor loses momentum as the cleric shuns her advances, and the action grows frenetic following the arrival of his twin brother, a macho general.

Despite the title, this is less a soccer documentary than a corporate hagiography along the lines of "The Last Mogul" or "The Kid Stays in the Picture"; its real hero isn't Cosmos star Pele (who wisely declined to be interviewed), but Steve Ross, CEO of Warner Communications, which owned the team.

Eric Brevig, making his feature directing debut after a long career as a visual effects supervisor, lurches from one CG set piece to the next, though he's helped along by Fraser's easy comic touch.

Shana Feste's screenplay seldom rises above the level of daytime TV; the only actor who triumphs over her trite dialogue is Tim McGraw in a nonsinging role as Paltrow's husband and manager.

This gets off to a pretty good start, with most of the laughs coming from beefy Kevin Heffernan and nerdy Steve Lemme. But at 111 minutes, the movie is too slackly paced to build up enough momentum; like the characters they play, these guys don't know when to call it a night.

It's mostly fascinating, though the unconverted may be in for a rough two hours.

For me, part of the fun of Snake Eyes is the genuine satisfaction of seeing Brian De Palma finally arriving at his own level.

Despite some sentimentality and occasional directorial missteps, this is a respectable piece of work--evocative, very funny in spots, and obviously keenly felt. With Francis Capra, Taral Hicks, and Katherine Narducci.

Producer Ismail Merchant died in 2005, but Merchant Ivory's stuffy tradition of quality lives on.

The story is mechanical, but Twohy paces it well enough to showcase the spectacular costumes (by Ellen Mirojnick and Michael Dennison) and production design (by Holger Gross).

The film ultimately comes up short when it has to deal with Hickok as something other than a legend; Hill is hampered as usual by his fixation on iconography.

Takes too long to get its themes and characters out on the field.

The results are obviously sincere and relatively serious for De Palma (with a fresh handling of wide-screen composition that plays on some of the moral conflicts and ambiguities), but the entire film is predicated on a fairly unquestioning acceptance of the morality of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam—the issue of whether the highly principled hero enlisted or was drafted isn't even brought up—as well as a refusal to link this war with other U.S. involvements in the third world. So the feeling of helplessness that the film honors and provokes amounts to a moral cop-out rather than a genuine confrontation with what the war meant and continues to mean.

There's wonderful use made of a Maine port town, and Ruben gets a dizzying thrill or two out of overhead shots, but the conceptual overload finally prevents this from coming together.

Madonna, making her directorial debut, aims for the romping irreverence of Richard Lester's 60s comedies, and though she lacks the formal control to pull it off, this is a charming mess.

Throughout the tour O'Brien makes it a point of pride to oblige his fans, though even this comes off as self-centered.

Documentary filmmaker Chuck Workman has a slick and entertaining way of stitching together old footage and practically no analytical or historical insight at all.

The couple's parents have a bit more personality than the other characters, but on the whole this is strictly by the numbers.

The plot is just a delivery system for a series of gruesome, convoluted, and--depending on your tolerance for sadism--hilarious freak accidents.

A major disappointment because here, unlike on "Real Time," Maher aims for laughs instead of insight--and aims low.

As the silver-tongued romantic with the impossible nose load, Martin affects a sincerity that reminds you of Danny Kaye—funny enough, i guess, but I like the smarmy original a good deal more.

In this uneven Disney comedy Adam Sandler tones down his arrested-development persona, trading crass humor for warm fuzzies.

As the envious, destructive best friends of the central couple, Jim Belushi and (especially) Elizabeth Perkins have the actor's know-how to fill in the gaps, but as the lovers, Rob Lowe and Demi Moore are hopelessly pallid.

Each set piece is effectively executed, but the characters and their motivations become progressively dimmer and more confused.

The Rock's ungainly performance is somewhat alleviated by Karl Urban as a crew member and Rosamund Pike as his twin sister.

The disconnect between the human actors and the digital backgrounds is more pronounced here than in a futuristic adventure like "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow," and because classic Hollywood cinema is so rich with epic images of antiquity, this can't help but seem chintzy.

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

The leads are the whole show, and the understated visuals give them room to make the material their own. But none of the other characters is all that fleshed out (Eddie Marsan, as the woman's cruel husband, hasn't got much to do), and despite having shot the entire film on location, Considine never establishes much sense of place.

Though the action is a bit intense for very young kids, it's probably no worse than what they see on television.

A substantial performance from Clive Owen rescues what might otherwise have been a fairly gooey fatherhood drama.

Few movies on the subject of peer pressure offer so wide a cultural critique, even pointing a finger at underwear billboards, and Bellott's roving eye makes him a filmmaker to watch.

This forceful expose shows how area residents are fighting to keep their beloved Coal Mountain pristine, but filmmaker Bill Haney allots too much screen time to environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and barely any to the urban consumers in distant states whose thirst for cheap electric power is part of the problem.

Has the enthusiasm and naivete of a first feature.

Whimsical fantasy tends to work best when its premise is used sparingly, but in this case the fantasy element takes over the story, becoming mechanical and often confused.

Clayton lacks the Jamesian temper, and his film is finally more indecisive than ambiguous. Too much Freud and too little thought.

Billy Wilder's 1954 version of the Samuel Taylor staple was a perfect vehicle for Audrey Hepburn, though the cut is too tight for her costars, Humphrey Bogart and William Holden. [Review of re-release]

The characters are instantly reversible--the bratty kid turns out to be a sweetie pie, the mother just needs to be told off. Only Giamatti, as the cliched businessman husband, is irredeemable.

In minimizing the novel's morbidity, Tran also denies its obsessive pull.

This is loads of fun in the early stretch, as the characters are being introduced, but the story never really goes anywhere.

It's not done in a way that suggests a fully formed talent—"promising juvenilia" is about the most one can say for it.

Forgettable nostalgia trip from 1974, shot in 16-millimeter by the enterprising Stephen Verona and Martin Davidson. Somehow, this little exploitationer ended up launching the careers of Sylvester Stallone, Henry Winkler, Perry King, and Susan Blakely.

Perkins tries to imitate Hitchcock's visual style, but most of the film is made without concern for style of any kind, unless it's the bludgeoning nonstyle of Friday the 13th.

In place of the sharply etched observational humor of the original, which featured a host of no-name actors in memorably quirky performances, we now get mostly raunch and some flaccid cameos from Smith cronies Ben Affleck and Jason Lee.

Though director Ulu Grosbard is as good as he usually is with most of the actors, the story problems tend to stump him too.

Dumont is much more confident when he sticks to the title town and the young woman the men left behind; his habit of alternating close shots with extreme long shots and his singularly unsentimental way of showing sex are as distinctive as ever.

Patricia Clarkson is wonderfully acerbic as April's cancer-afflicted mom, and the finale is surprisingly subtle and sweet, but the rest of this DV feature is as contrived as a sitcom.

With its stagy dance numbers, this reminded me more of Bob Fosse's confessional musical "All That Jazz" than "8 1/2," though it suffers from comparison to either, given that Marshall is several steps removed from Fellini's feverish self-investigation.

A slick reprise of all the elements that clicked in the original with none of the seedy originality that made it work.

An unholy mess that becomes steadily more incoherent -- morally, dramatically, and conceptually.

The sheer oddness of the New York world constructed for this film--where cops and crooks are literally interchangeable, and Oldman and Danny Aiello are stranded in roles that pick over the leavings of earlier parts--ultimately seems at once too deranged and too mechanical.

The Griswolds, headed by Chevy Chase, are taking what could be one of their last family vacations.

This picture is packed with fun, but it doesn't really go anywhere, and elements that summon up memories of The Hustler don't work in its favor.

The script is a veritable cosmos of Spielberg in-jokes, but the writer-stars also make room for some vicious and decidedly English digs at red-state shit-kickers and Christian fundamentalists.

An alternately comic and macabre portrait of a deranged friendship.

Like its main character, the movie hits the road with no final destination in mind, and the manic inventiveness that sustains the early passages becomes strained and weird by the end.

Slightly bloated Bond, with too much technology and a climactic slaughter that's a little too mindless to be much fun. Still, Adolfo Celi—with his “heat and cold, applied scientifically”—makes a most memorable villain.

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

Minor grisly fun, but don't expect the movie to linger when it's over.

While the filmmakers manage to keep things interesting (sexy, kinky, and ambiguous) much of the time, the self-conscious piety that Frears lavishes on this material places it in an uncertain netherworld that prevents it from ever becoming fully convincing, even as a stylistic exercise.

Commendable as pop history but fairly opaque as drama.

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.

Mitchell Leisen, the director, hadn't yet developed the light touch with actors he would display memorably later in the decade, though some of his trademark pictorial effects are in evidence.

In the end I couldn't be sure whether its morality was complex or just confused. Like its young athletes, it earns a gentleman's C.

This 2003 drama suffers from a heavy narrative hand, as a series of ironic coincidences creates a tiny, hermetically sealed New York City, but the contrivances are overwhelmed by the intimacy and immediacy of the human encounters.

The crude technique of director Sean Cunningham borrows whatever sophistication it has from Halloween's precise and elegant point-of-view shots of the killer, though Cunningham often cheats by using the ploy inconsistently. For all its shoddiness, the film manages, just barely, to achieve its ignoble goals--it delivers what it promises.

Canadian-made unpleasantness (1975) about a psychopath stalking a college town. Bob Clark's direction is enthusiastic but sloppy-a presaging of his later Porky's. [02 Dec 2010, p.52]

Infamous has dramaturgical strengths, whether or not it gets the facts right. Jones's performance as Capote tends to be delivered in a monotone, yet thanks to Craig all of their scenes together are potently realized.

Death of a President wants to function as a mindless thriller that eventually makes us think -- and only after the film is over question the form that encouraged us to be mindless. These are incompatible agendas, and in the end neither is fully successful.

Most of the screen time goes to American-Armenian hard rock band System of a Down, whose grating concert footage trivializes Garapedian's message.

Doesn't reflect anyone's love or hatred for anything, just a lot of anxiety about test marketing, which means it takes a nosedive when it goes shopping for an ending.

The action has been transferred from suburbia to New York City, but otherwise the filmmakers stick like glue to the formula of the original: a little boy from a well-to-do family left on his own is threatened by low-life working-class crooks whom he repeatedly foils and tortures, and upscale property values prevail.

By the time [James Ivory and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala] get around to articulating a story, the inhibitions imposed by their "good taste" begin to seem more like gutlessness, and what initially promises to be an exposure of American liberal doublethink about slavery winds up as a querulous wimp out on a subject that the underrated "Mandingo" is better equipped to deal with.

Murphy takes on a softer edge than usual this time: the plot recalls a Jeanette MacDonald operetta of the Depression, the mythical African country looks like a Beverly Hills fever dream, and, true to Murphy's idealized black middle-class view of things, everybody gets what he wants without much fuss or sacrifice, and virtually the only poor people in evidence are white.

Fascinating and troubling documentary.

The project reeks of commercial calculation, which is just tolerable until Walker, in search of a story arc, follows two chorus members with serious illnesses into the hospital.

It's nice to see a high-concept comedy with such a generous concept.

It's almost worth seeing, though, for the incredible action set piece at the center.

It's a powerful psychological conceit, but Samuell subverts it at every turn with his carnivalesque style and canned Gallic wistfulness.

It's a western, of sorts, and for the first half it's a lot of fun. But then things fall apart, and the film becomes fatally episodic.

Director Eli Roth is adept at building a sense of foreboding; unfortunately, once the bloodletting begins, all sense of drama and logic oozes out along with it.

Best known as a still photographer, Ellis has a powerful motif in the idea of stopping time, yet he can't seem to move his characters along.

David Lean's studied, plodding, overanalytic direction manages to kill most of the meaning in E.M. Forster's haunting novel of cultural collision in colonial India.