With all these safety features built in, this 1985 film is too well padded to qualify as genuinely radical wit, but in an even-toned, TV sort of way it's mildly amusing and inventive throughout.

The romantic denouement is so predictable it must have driven the animators mad as they worked, but their modest art is eerily effective.

Like Robert Altman's "M*A*S*H" this has a banquet scene posed like The Last Supper, but the basic idea--toothless satire trimming a dull star party--reminded me more of "Ready to Wear."

This comedy is an ill-fated attempt to remake "Risky Business" (1983) for the 21st century, complete with a wind-chimey score, the hero posing in his underpants, and a cynical happy ending.

Leaking platitudes and cutesy ambience, this comedy folds a smarmy, social-issue subplot into a Saturday-morning-kids'-show sensibility; it's full of geeky gadgetry, and must've been a lot more fun to make than it is to watch.

This amiable romantic comedy benefits from its stellar ensemble.

Shot at the same time as "The Matrix Reloaded," this last installment is the shortest of the bunch at 129 minutes, but I still succumbed to special-effects hypnosis in the last hour.

This comedy drama is capably acted and undeniably touching in spots.

Overall, though, the flashes of competence just emphasize the extent to which the film has no idea what it's doing.

It looks like a potboiler: only a few of Peckinpah's themes are present, and they're mostly left undeveloped. But Peckinpah can still stage a fight scene better than anyone, and the film establishes its own crazy rhythm as it runs off wildly through most of the southwest.

Diaz, costars Jason Segel and Justin Timberlake, and a sharp supporting cast manage to deliver a crappy good time, mercifully devoid of any heart-tugging teacher-student subplots.

The movie is compelling now but unlikely to survive its moment.

None of these guys has much interesting to say.

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

Like the first movie, this has some cute gags but collapses like a soggy paper plate because it can't decide whether to mock or celebrate the heroine's shallow materialism.

This drama about Baltimore firefighters makes a serious effort to honor the sacrifices of professional rescue workers, but blasts of hokum keep threatening to collapse the building.

The old-fashioned theme of disaster as an existential test of character still works.

Well-intentioned but obvious drama.

The current burlesque revival is a throwback to ostensibly more innocent times, and writer-director Steven Antin finds something redemptive in each character.

For all her prolificacy, Agatha Christie relied too often on one particular plot twist, and as soon as you recognize her old favorite here, the film loses all interest—it has nothing going for it apart from the mystery, which, of course, is no way to make a mystery movie.

The young sweethearts amuse themselves by donning steampunk outfits and crashing the funerals of dead children, which may seem quirky and sweet if you can disregard the awful grief of such gatherings; the problem is that, once you manage this, the main characters' grief doesn't register either.

The aerial dogfights are thrilling, but the script seems to have been written by Snoopy.

The only thing that keeps the proceedings bearable is the cast gamely rolling with all the shameless sitcom punches the script keeps throwing at them.

This is a killer idea for a political satire, and screenwriters Jason Richman and Joshua Michael Stern come close to realizing its farcical potential.

These ideas may well have cohered in Chuck Palahniuk's best-selling satirical novel, which I haven't read, but in this screen adaptation by writer-director Clark Gregg they seem more like an assortment of gimmicks.

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.

Alison Lohman isn't very convincing as the reporter who's trying to dredge up some dirt on the entertainers, and the elaborate flashback structure can't hide the fact that the story never fully comes to life.

After a slow setup, this charming fable wisely spends most of its time on the golf course.

This goofball comedy is easy to take and just as easy to leave alone--unless you develop an affection for the hapless characters, which isn't too hard to do.

To call this campy would be charitable.

This atmosphere-heavy drama, with its comfortably quirky characters, elegant performances, and ever shifting tone, is so innocuous it's not worth panning.

Solid performances by Fiennes, Jonathan Firth, and a frail but funny Peter Ustinov keep this watchable.

Unfunny and instantly forgettable comedy.

Manages to transplant the action to Chicago without completely ruining it, though the emotional impact is largely deflated by the change in cultures.

Unfortunately writer-director Paul Feig has a weakness for artiness in general and hokey art movies in particular, and the overall sluggishness of this 2003 adaptation starring Ben Tibber makes such devices as slow-motion seem like mannered rhetoric.

The set-up is tediously slow, while the later murders are packed so tightly it's like watching a blender on high speed.

This is mostly a listless hodgepodge of half-improvised whatever, the seven lead characters so flatly conceived they're like the Keystone Kops (without the chops).

Garcia seems to be aping the "Godfather" movies and Warren Beatty's "Reds," but the movie's gracefulness is limited to its handling of the music (some of which Garcia wrote).

The CGI characters seem less like artwork than humans wearing animal suits, but despite the overall ugliness and sitcom timing, this has enough action, violence, and invention to keep kids amused.

Semiabsorbing.

An exceptionally stupid movie.

The picture seems deliberately trite, blunt, and manipulative, as if the producers didn't trust their audience to respond to anything else.

I missed the first half hour of this Zorro adventure, and it's a tribute to the idiot-proof screenplay that I had no trouble following the rest.

For most of this romantic comedy, fatuous contrivances run neck and neck with what seem to be authentic observations about repressed sibling rivalry; some of the latter are too painful to be funny, and eventually the contrivances win out, but the cast keeps it all watchable.

Despite the off-rhythm styling and suggestions of primeval menace, there's really not much going on here.

Screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin won an Oscar for "Ghost" (1990), a pleasant, moderately thoughtful weepie that this movie closely resembles.

This is really less fun than the more baroque Meyer outings, such as Up!, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, and Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens—perhaps because too much routine violence and nastiness keeps getting in the way.

Though its startling shifts in tone sometimes seem unmotivated, this dark yet syrupy 1998 romance has an adolescent charm.

An extravagant mess.

Coolidge directs as if the characters were believable human beings--at least until she gets to the end, when Hollywood and fairy-tale conventions have to triumph over humanity and common sense.

Washington's stoic persona here conceals a volcanic rage, and the cast of pros--including Giancarlo Giannini, Mickey Rourke and Rachel Ticotin--support him with relish.

If Sayles had persuaded me he knew anything about Bush, his background, or his entourage that isn't already well-known, I might have felt more like laughing.

None of it is very convincing, thanks to Tuggle's shaky storytelling: on the one hand, he sets up his plot twists with such elephantine emphasis that the payoffs are invariably anticlimactic; on the other, he relies constantly and shamelessly on the most outre coincidence. Still, the action scenes do have a certain punch and vigor, and there are a few fresh, offbeat views of the City of Angels. Part of the point of the project seems to be to prove that Hall can “act” (as if his comic roles were something else), and he does move honorably if not remarkably through a mumbling Method performance.

Matt Dillon almost runs away with the movie as a preening, conniving NASCAR champ who may be dumber than a box of rocks but realizes there's something up with the VW.

The feminist veneer is the most deeply disturbing part of this callow thriller, whose fetishizing of a dead woman's body (and a live woman's sexual behavior) is far more questionable than anything even "The Silence of the Lambs" has been accused of.

Running beyond three hours, the movie more than overstays its welcome, and despite some vague genuflections in the general direction of The Godfather regarding family ties and revenge, there are simply too many years and locations covered, too many crane shots and rainstorms.

The surprise ending is neatly done, but the characters are so thin that waiting around for it is no fun whatsoever.

The thing runs more than two hours, but this is the sort of project that's indemnified against charges of excess.

The problem is that only a fan would be inclined to tolerate this dunderheaded mystery.

Rides high on its old-fashioned sentiments and the precocious charms of its teenage star, who can be both obnoxious and endearing.

It's a letdown from the man who brought us "Men in Black" and "Addams Family Values."

Though its ending feels protracted--especially the climactic chase--it kept me reasonably distracted.

This special-effects animal-action comedy is for heavily identified pet owners.

This silly, contrived video--plays like a student work.

Thoughtful and complex.

Not so much a sequel to "The Fugitive" as a lazy spin-off that imitates only what was boring and artificially frenetic about that earlier thriller; the little that kept it interesting.

Any movie that name-checks Ford Maddox Ford's novel "The Good Soldier" is OK by me, and clearly writer-director Julio DePietro has made a careful study of Ford's crafty, illusory narrative.

Van Sant's doomed and misguided experiment.

There's no real reason it should be set in the 70s, except that the freaky wigs, loud clothes, and wall-to-wall soul classics are needed to bolster the nothing script.

Directing real-life street kids, Tan abruptly shifts focus from one character to another, as if mimicking their impatience and short attention span, and like Godard he playfully subverts his own material by having actors address the camera directly, spouting cultural and political asides.

Directed by Richard Benjamin, this is an inordinately silly comedy that manages to be pretty likable if one can get past some of its harebrained premises.

Lakeview Terrace isn't literally about the riots, but it's still one of the toughest racial dramas to come out of Hollywood since the fires died down--much tougher, for instance, than Paul Haggis’s hand-wringing Oscar winner "Crash."

This is sentimental but dramatically solid, its placid themes fortified by De Niro.

Not so much ill conceived and misdirected as unconceived and undirected, this is folly on a grand scale.

In the manner of a southern gothic, they never fail to fascinate.

Unfortunately the story lurches like the characters' beat-up T-bird...and the film's rebellious attitude wears thin long before its sentimental denouement.

Not all of these ideas are successfully dramatized, and you may have trouble believing in most of the characters, but as a deeply personal work about free-floating existential identities, this 1989 film has the kind of grit and feeling that few action comedies can muster, with Eastwood and Peters interesting and unpredictable throughout.

This parallel-reality shtick would be OK if the gun violence weren't so awful--but staging a murder again and again for the sake of some undergraduate head game is no more defensible than using it to pump up an action flick.

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.

Carnahan stays true to the source material by delivering carnage without consequence (the machine gun-toting bad guys still can't hit a barn from the inside), his convoluted plot and multiple villains may challenge the attention span of the target demographic.

If I were a Christian, I'd be appalled to have this primitive and pornographic bloodbath presume to speak for me.

Chris Klein steals the film as a rival ex-nerd, now the most gorgeous guy in town, while director Roger Kumble (Cruel Intentions) cribs from the Farrelly brothers and the Three Stooges.

Even 82 minutes seems an eternity...The net effect is weirdly reminiscent of taking part in any online community, where a "relationship" is more like a juxtaposing of egos.

Despite a brisk opening and some agreeable (if sloppy) choreography at the very end, I was less than tickled by the premise of David Serrano's script, that the characters lie to and betray one another as naturally as they breathe.

The simplistic drawing is closer to "Peanuts" than "The Lion King," and the dialogue is strangely anachronistic.

So lackluster both as an homage and as a story in its own right that I was already forgetting it before it was over.

Apart from Curtis, no one seems to be trying very hard (least of all director James Bridges, whose excellent work in the 70s seems long behind him here), and the film falls apart from a horribly evident lack of interest, conviction, and imagination.

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.

Monstrously offensive movie.

Mathis and Bullock are especially good, and Phoenix and Mulroney, playing out a jealousy-prone friendship as if they were Jeff Bridges and Timothy Bottoms in Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show, do a fair job with their roles.

Roberts never surmounts the cracker-barrel contrivance of the plot, but his low-key humor, clear affection for the characters, and strong cast are enough to put this gentle drama across.

McGee has taken Hitchcock's idea of the MacGuffin to such an extreme that the plot becomes a set of nesting dolls with nothing at the center, but the players conjure up a smoky mood of existential sadness.

A Disney musical with an undistinguished score (Alan Menken and Jack Feldman), fair to middling choreography (Kenny Ortega and Peggy Holmes), and clunky direction (Ortega) that still manages to be entertaining in spots because of its story.

The ugly emotional mess is so respectfully handled that the story resonates far beyond its comic designs.

Eventually develops into a pleasantly bombastic Bond-style adventure.

The comic timing and Gibson's mugging are skillful, but the movie fulfills expectations of plot twists and ironic atmosphere only after having made clear that it won't be offering much else.

Nat Mauldin and Larry Levin's screenplay, indifferently directed by Betty Thomas, is simply an excuse for tired scatological jokes involving animal characters with the voices of well-known actors.