Teen romance and operetta-style singing replace the horror elements familiar to moviegoers, and director Joel Schumacher obscures any remnants of classy stage spectacle with the same disco overkill he brought to "Batman Forever."

The sensibility is Southern California Witless, and the jokey intertitles that periodically take up half the 'Scope frames ("This is a comedy. Sort of.") are even more smarmy than the characters.

This has its moments, but most of these are engulfed by the overall murk.

All the male pulchritude can't make up for a muddled script.

Routine crime thriller.

With its sappy musical vignettes and encounter-session dialogue, the movie consistently overplays its insights, though all three leads contribute thoughtful and genuine performances.

Falls flat.

Indifferently scripted and shoddily animated feature.

Director Jonathan Kaplan clearly has a feel for the material, but he's at the mercy of a pedestrian script by David Arata and producer Adam Fields.

The darker aspects of tribalism come under scrutiny here as nonconformists (unmarried men, women alone) are shown being marginalized.

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 actors make this fun if you can overlook the ludicrous view of Jeremy Leven's screenplay.

The plot keeps switching tracks.

Cutesy and unconvincing parable.

Unfunny and instantly forgettable comedy.

Likable as she is, Latifah can't overcome a tortured mistaken-identity plot, buffoonery on the ski slopes, and enough saccharine dialogue to induce shock.

Not even supercool Robert De Niro can enliven this boring tale about a team of mercenary operatives.

It’s amazingly dull, even with William Powell in the lead and guest appearances by the likes of Ray Bolger and Fanny Brice, so of course it won the Best Picture Oscar for 1936.

The TV show was mildly subversive, with humor that children and adults could enjoy on different levels, but the movie strives for a blander, family-oriented middle ground.

Reasonably entertaining spy-versus-spy shenanigans were for me partially undercut by the hypocritical pretense that the CIA and its various forms of mischief were somehow being ridiculed.

I wasn't exactly engaged, but this time boredom never took over.

Told from too many perspectives, the narrative puts suspense above substance, and its social consciousness seems contrived.

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

Stupid, vicious, and pretentious, though you may find it worth checking out if you want to experiment with your own nervous system.

Of course the movie's real raison d'etre is watching Ice Cube tear up government facilities and blockades with a tank, spout Schwarzenegger-style kiss-off lines, and commandeer the kind of babes and high-tech cars that James Bond usually plays with.

A chaotic sequence midway through shows Mormon and gay-rights protesters shouting abuse at each other in San Francisco, and that's pretty much what the whole movie feels like.

The best short on this program of five is Bradley Rust Gray's 18-minute "Hitch."

Shamelessly derivative and politically expedient.

Well-meaning rot from 1963.

Spade claims he latched onto his snide persona to distinguish himself from the pack; it's served him well as an ensemble player and a big-screen foil to Chris Farley, but as a romantic lead he's hopeless.

This has its moments--most of them thanks to Kilmer and Joe Mantegna as the boy's abusive father--but the troubled romance is unconvincing and the big-name actors hang on the story like ornaments on a spindly tree.

Although I have no facts to support my impression, this erotic courtroom thriller looks as if it grew out of Madonna seeing Basic Instinct and saying, “I wanna do one of those."

Frank Whaley and Philip Seymour Hoffman play minor characters so annoying they might as well wear T-shirts reading "Eat My Brain."

A curiously sour movie in its amused contempt for this fatuous family laced with affectionate nostalgia for its unshakable slickness and insularity, but also an undeniably strange one in its adoption of TV formats and cliches, as if these were the only indexes of contemporary reality that we have left.

Bitchy cheerleaders and swimming pool catfights are just two of the tedious cliches propping up this brittle comedy.

A smart script by Gail Parent (Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman) boosts the first half of this comedy.

It loses steam once the wraiths become fully visible: they're just not scary enough.

Its resolution reeks of phoniness and self-congratulation, even if some of the narrative strands leading up to it are fairly absorbing.

Even though it stars Albert Finney, this is a picture of no importance, undone mainly by its self-ingratiated cuteness.

Without Diesel's brooding lunkhead presence it's more like "1/2 Fast 1/2 Furious."

Brian De Palma demonstrates the drawbacks of a film-school education by overexploiting every cornball trick of style in the book: slow motion, split screen long takes, and soft focus abound, all to no real point...He's an overachiever—which might not make for good movies, but at least he's seldom dull.

Nicely paced but so fluffy it threatens to waft away.

Sweetly mediocre.

It takes forever to get moving, but when it finally does, the Quaid and Stone characters still seem ill defined.

Coppola based her script on a revisionist biography by Antonia Fraser, though the film reads most poignantly as a personal statement; like Marie, the director was born to a life of privilege and carries the burden of a proud family legacy.

There's more soul to be found in any Kong close-up than in this film's overplayed reactions, which are used to instruct us what we should be feeling at any given moment. This is never boring, but I can't recall another Spielberg film that left me with a more hollow feeling.

Walter Hill directed this 1989 feature from a pulpy script by Ken Friedman (based on John Godey’s novel The Three Worlds of Johnny Handsome), and its nasty, predictable plot and unpleasant characters aren’t made any more bearable by Hill’s customary smoke, sweat, funk, and neon.

Among the movie's many flaws are lackluster cinematography and leaden sound design. The Lost World also includes irritating little missteps in the plot.

It isn't very good, but it doesn’t seem to care, which turns out to be rather refreshing.

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

The material is familiar, the Berkeley locations are strictly boilerplate, and there are times when the characters seem more like high school students than college kids.

Director Ronald Neame brings his impersonal British craftsmanship to this 1979 feature, so it isn't a complete bust, but it's a long way from the apocalyptic satisfactions of his Poseidon Adventure.

Guy Hamilton's direction lacks enthusiasm and pace, while even the art direction—long the Bond films' real secret weapon—seems to have fallen to a shrunken budget. Not much fun.

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

Sappy.

The movie's first half hour is a barrage of lazy narrative pointers--endless expository voice-over, freeze frames and captions to identify the numerous characters--and by the time screenwriter Tina Gordon Chism decides to write an extended scene, the story is already dead in the water.

Handsomely mounted and stylishly directed but otherwise rather unpleasant.

Grade-school violence freaks may find a few kicks here, but even they may have trouble coping with this ugly movie’s ending about eight separate times.

Its blurring of the line between parody and exploitation only makes it totally innocuous.

The martial arts choreography is neither graceful nor exciting--it's worthy of a video game. Only after cars, trucks, and a motorcycle join the action--easily outclassing all the actors--does the movie take on a modicum of vitality.

John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd star as two white boys who love nuns, blacks, and the blues. But for all of the dramatic focus on poverty, the subject of John Landis's mise-en-scene is money—making it, spending it, blowing it away. The humor is predicated on underplaying in overscaled situations, which is sporadically funny in a Keaton-esque way but soon sputters out through sheer, uninspired repetition.

Overlong, stiff, and about as suspenseful as a detergent commercial, The Bad Seed has one small asset, Patty McCormack as the child, but that's about it.

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

Gene Kelly directed, a long way from Terpsichore apparently, though not, alas, from the Thanksgiving turkey.

This dull actioner, written and directed by Mark Steven Johnson, uses voice-over to hurry along Daredevil's genesis tale, and Affleck's rigid performance is a perpetual drag on the story.

Slack and unconvincing throughout with the exception of Ringwald, who remains natural and appealing as the thin world of the film collapses around her.

This serious if assaultively stylish meditation on faith uses traditional elements of religion-based horror in a way that's more innocent than calculating.

Seems intentionally slapdash and stupid, but when one of them referred to Europe as a "country," I wasn't sure if it was meant as a joke or not. Even so, I laughed once or twice.

A few of the one-liners are snappy and clever, but the project sinks under an overelaborated superciliousness.

The dual-track plot, with constant cutting between mother and daughter, seems less an attempt to establish meaningful parallels between the two stories than the nervous twitches of a compulsive channel changer.

An intermittently enjoyable bad movie that never knows when to stop.

Gamely running through parodies of TV commercials and shows, not to mention Spielberg, Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Selznick, and Gandhi, the movie proves to be awful by any standards--feeble, corny, and labored in script as well as direction--although the Capracorn of the basic premise occasionally manages to convey a certain sweetness.

The characters' undiluted self-interest will seem one-dimensional to all but the worst cynics.

The only thing that really amused me was a subplot involving music and video piracy.

Involves a team of divers exploring a vast cave system, an appropriate setting given the hollowness of the story and acting.

Peter Weir's attempt to make a "Casablanca" for the 80s - a romance set against a background of exoticism and intrigue - suffers from hazy plotting and a constant, pretentious mystification.

This 1944 Hepburn-Tracy pairing is so undistinguished that it's nearly dropped out of the history books.

This isn't very good--the puritanical impulses of the slasher genre collide head-on with the sweet-butt requirements of gay exploitation flicks--but a gender studies major could have a field day with it.

Roger Moore is a pastry chef's idea of James Bond; but Christopher Lee as the archetype of the evil antagonist makes this 007 outing just about bearable.

The September Issue fixates on status and professional one-upmanship; if you want to see a movie that actually treats fashion as personal expression--in other words, art--keep a lookout for Anne Fontaine’s forthcoming biopic "Coco Before Chanel."

Never gets around to explaining how he (Michael Morra) picked up the moniker Rockets Redglare. In fact, the intimacy of this portrait may be a disadvantage.

So lightweight that you're likely to start forgetting it before it's even over.

It's a slick, empty spectacle, with antipathetic stars and a director with no basic sympathy for the myths he's treating.

Instead of a credible main character this 1999 button pusher has lots of showy cinematography and generic dread.

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.

Oscillates bewilderingly between contrived and insightful, mechanical and sincere, clumsy and graceful.

The script lacks wit, and the in-joke references to cinematic sci-fi classics will soar over little kids' heads without pleasing many adults.

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.

The result is a deadly disappointment, despite Ryan Reynolds's cocky, muscle-flexing charisma as the daredevil test pilot turned intergalactic peacekeeper and Peter Sargaard's movie-stealing turn as a nerdy scientist turned psycho monster.

The film mechanically uses the crosscutting technique made famous by Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove" without any of its wit or focused energy.

So clinically detached it borders on absurd.

Despite a provocative climax, the movie settles into a ponderous collection of soliloquies.

Big, schmaltzy melodrama with mini melodramas.

Technically speaking, this feeble effort is the ninth Pink Panther or Inspector Clouseau comedy, but only the third without Peter Sellers. Roberto Benigni (Life Is Beautiful) does what he can as Inspector Clouseau Jr. (which isn't much, given the degree of prominence accorded to a hackneyed kidnapping plot).

Bruce Willis's marvelous performance as a contract killer only makes everything else about this comedy seem more pathetic.

A strong cast fails to rescue this ponderous Oscar bait.

This is a long way from the inspirations of Airplane!

Strains so hard to be upbeat you can almost hear gears shifting.