At long last, the Dead series may be ready for that final bullet between the eyes.

A film of ingredients, rather than ideas realized and integrated: it panders on different, disjunctive levels.

I was seduced part of the time, thanks largely to Bonham Carter's sensuality, but the whole is unsatisfying, and it's tempting to see the imposed recutting as a major source of the problem.

Basically, the film is a throwback to the 60s anti-Bond spy thriller (a la The Ipcress File), except here the genre's annihilating irony has been replaced by Pollack's liberal piousness.

This 1998 movie is essentially a compilation of things-aren't-what-they-seem games played on the viewer; all its little tricks, including Ricci's snide and smart-alecky voice-overs about movie conventions, are really old--except one. But it's not worth the wait.

Dopey but charming.

Neither good nor terrible.

Oscar baiting is the main point of this unintentionally silly drama.

Stodgy storytelling and a hyperbolic score reduce their experiences to melodrama.

It's gooey fun for the first reel or two despite an abundance of close-ups that render the frantic action nearly unreadable.

Maybe the magic will work for those who loved the book, but I found this film stultifyingly self-important and, despite the regularity with which it cuts to the chase, weirdly static.

A step down from the first Naked Gun cop-thriller spoof, which was a step down from Airplane! and Top Secret!; but if you care about such fine distinctions, this may be marginally better than Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear. Or at least it is when the movie finally arrives at the climactic Academy Awards ceremony; prior to that, it's mainly just one little-boy gag after another.

Some of the illustrious cast members were on their way up (John Travolta), but most of them were on their way down (Eddie Albert, Ida Lupino, Keenan Wynn).

Hokey.

Under his (Fry’s) direction this 2003 British feature becomes a flat, depressing affair.

An intriguing noir whose conceptual sophistication is partly undermined by naive execution.

It's his sense that he is superior to the series (which he certainly is) that introduces a fatal strain of campiness and condescension. And without absolute conviction, no action film can survive: if there's no belief, there's no danger.

Lost me early on with its show-offy shooting and editing, portentous metaphysical conceits about winners and losers, and exaggerated displays of evil, violence, and deceit.

The stunt work is pretty good, the brain work close to nonexistent.

Cage is the only actor allowed to do riffs on his assigned part, something he takes full advantage of; the others are stuck with their two-dimensional satirical profiles, which grow increasingly tiresome and unyielding as the comic plot predictably unfolds.

Grant seems stymied in this claustrophobic, essentially misogynistic material, and director Irving Reis isn’t the man to pull him out.

Most of this is silly, dim-witted stuff, but a few of the shocks carry some of the crude power of Jack Arnold's low-budget horror films of the 50s.

It's not clear why Steven Spielberg's Amblin decided to make a live-action entertainment starring the least interesting and most saccharine of all 50s cartoon characters, the friendly ghost who can't help scaring people, but here's your chance to search for an answer.

Satisfying in small ways.

This is pretty much the Lucas mixture as usual, this time in a Tolkien mode, with everything from the Old Testament to Kurosawa to Disney fed into a blender and turned into wallpaper. For easy-to-please five-year-olds of all ages.

This weightless melodrama exhibits the kind of condescending “fairness” (nobody's right, nobody's wrong—these things just happen, that's all) that is often taken for artistic maturity, but just as frequently reflects a reluctance to engage the material on a deep emotional level.

I expected this to be much funnier: Latifah coasts on her charm and Fallon seems incapable of playing an actual character.

Howard lacks the sense of film rhythm --required to make such an exercise work. Just about the only clear triumph here is an underplayed performance by Angie Dickinson, though Winger and Rosanna Arquette also provide welcome relief from Howard and Le Mat's self-indulgent carousing.

Huston does a reverse take on the material, underplaying the grotesque situation until it turns into a parody on the problems of the average working couple, but the pacing is so lugubrious that the laughs never materialize.

Material so bereft of plot and insight that all it can provide is actorly turns with no cogent means for tying them together.

Rowan Atkinson's recalcitrant TV character is the hub of this 1997 feature that will disappoint fans and nonfans alike.

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 the look aspires as usual to be both otherworldly and familiar, there's nothing that doesn't reek of southern California (as opposed to Hollywood) plastic, and this is as true of the characters as the decor.

One of the bleakest films of a bleak decade.

If this were witty, it might have qualified as a downtown version of "All About Eve"; if it were believable, I wouldn't have come away feeling that the actors (including Dylan McDermott and Chloe Sevigny) were wasted.

There's a lot less here than meets the eye.

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.

Never seems to find its tone.

De Niro sinks this crime drama with his vacant, inattentive performance as an affectionally challenged homicide detective.

Billy Wilder’s soggy and uninspired 1963 adaptation of the hit Broadway musical, minus the songs.

Benjamin's direction consists largely of giving Richard Benjamin inflections to most of the line readings; for the rest, he blandly shoots the screenplay, leaving large gaps in the narration unfilled and significant contradictions in the characters unexplained.

The story lurches from heavy-handed satire to heavy-handed drama. Heigl gives a winning performance, though Slattery-Moschkau seldom misses an opportunity to show her prancing around in her underwear.

This is the silliest horror movie I've seen in years, though some of the special effects are pretty good.

What it doesn't have is the first movie's primal understanding of patriarchal violence and feminist rage, as both moral horror and exploitation gold. As a result, this is a much easier movie to watch.

Mainly it's marking time: the characters take a definite backseat to the special effects, and much of the action seems gratuitous, leading nowhere.

Inevitably, however, this oh-so-cosmopolitan setup gradually devolves into resentment, messy romance, and marital strife.

Cassavetes's “Gloria” may have been action-packed nonsense, but it was enjoyable precisely because it was all of a piece. This Gloria is simply pieces--a few of them enjoyable, most of them not.

There is no place for depth or nuance in this slickly engineered complacency machine, which roars along at a single tone and pace, neatly dispelling every troubling intimation with a Mary Tyler Moore one-liner and solving all its conflicts with tricks of rhetoric.

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.

The Fort Lauderdale setting imparts little flavor or atmosphere, and the same goes for the flagrantly unerotic dances.

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.

Apart from a few incidental flickers of Wang’s sidelong humor, there’s little of his personality evident in this film about a divorced underground cartoonist (Tom Hulce) finding himself enmeshed in a murder plota story that steadily loses coherence and interest the longer it proceeds.

This 1970 animated feature is dull, careless, and all too typical of the Disney studio's slapdash output.

I wouldn't call this 1960 picture one of Billy Wilder's best comedies—it's drab, sappy, and overlong at 125 minutes.

The tectonic shifts in this camp-horror extravaganza are unsettling.

This frantic tale seems at once preachy and incoherent, collapsing into a more or less random collection of disconnected, unfocused scenes.

As usual Spielberg is too bored by everyday life to use his premise for anything but a fairy tale, whose cheap pathos suggests a bad Chaplin imitation. This grows progressively phonier and eventually devolves into "Mr. Roberts," with Stanley Tucci filling in for James Cagney as an airport bureaucrat.

This egregious collection of cock-waving cliches is the silliest piece of macho camp since Roadhouse.

Cliched narrative, which isn't funny as often as seems intended.

Perhaps what is least satisfying about Beineix' effort is its implied theme—that women are mere muses to be addled, suffocated, and sacrificed to revitalize the imaginations of men.

Clunky and obvious.

Jon Voight, the all-purpose villain, does a pretty good job of imitating Marlon Brando imitating a Paraguayan snake expert, but the rest of the players--including Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Eric Stoltz, Owen Wilson, Vincent Castellanos, Jonathan Hyde, and Kari Wuhrer--seem to be in a hurry to pick up their checks.

Bob Fosse clearly believes he has tumbled across something of deep significance in the story of murdered Playmate Dorothy Stratten, but when push comes to shove, he has no idea what it is—and the film quickly degenerates into a hypocritically artsy interpretation of the standard slasher formula.

Behind all the macho bluster stand (or, it would appear, sit) director Tony Scott, writers Michael Schiffer and Richard P. Henrick, and producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, trying (and failing) to get all the characters to behave like grown-ups.

Queen Latifah's warmth has boosted middling movies like "Beauty Shop" and "Last Holiday," but she and costar Common can't strike enough sparks to ignite this weak romantic comedy.

Killing Zoe has little of the style, pacing, characterization, or wit of Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction (though Avary worked on the scripts of both).

But where Dante's cynicism ultimately carried the day over Spielberg's piousness in Gremlins, Explorers remains a hopelessly schizophrenic film, obscenely eager to compromise its own originality.

Any guy who sits through this date movie deserves to get to third base at least.

Overlong but watchable.

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

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.

The surface activity keeps one occupied, but never adds up to much because none of the characters is developed beyond the cartoon level; and the snobby sense of knowingness that's over everything is uncomfortably close to what the movie is supposed to be dissecting.

Bloated with visual effects, this sequel to the 2006 hit starts off slowly, reintroducing the original characters.

Writer-director Toni Kallem generates some touching moments (most of them involving Tom Bower as Taylor's wisp of a father), but this never surmounts the woeful miscasting of its two leads.

Somehow Christie’s talent shines through this muck, and Laurence Harvey gets to do an entertaining George Sanders impression as the leader of the revels.

A serious disappointment, recommended only for inveterate Disney fans and very young people.

The first third or so offers all the dominatrix fantasies one might wish for, but then fantasy gives way to the aggressiveness of the special effects and optical effects.

The sensibility of this movie is so adolescent that it's hard to take it as seriously as the filmmakers intend us to.

Has some flavor, and Ron Silver gives a swell impersonation of a cool and slimy studio executive.

Redford's inability to suggest any irony about himself finally sinks it—it's the only sanctimonious satire you'll ever see.

Weak comedy.

The standard line on this actor-heavy, brain-light concoction by writer-director John Herzfeld (1996) is that it’s Short Cuts meets Pulp Fiction, but it isn’t a tenth as good as either.

There are a few witty touches (POV shots given to the urn holding the mother's ashes) but the mood swings erratically and ineffectively from deadpan drollery to heartfelt romance.

Photographed in murky yellows and browns by John Alonzo, this 1979 film is sluggish and vague, trivializing its subject in a wash of unearned sentimentality.

A moment or two between Richard Farnsworth and Wilford Brimley recall the verbal skills of Levinson's Diner; the rest of the film is bloatedly “visual”: blinding backlighting, grandiose slow motion, overstudied montage.

This three-hour 1962 remake of the Charles Laughton-Clark Gable MGM classic (1935) was the first production in which Marlon Brando really ran amok, with various delays causing the budget to skyrocket. Hardly anyone was pleased with the results.

Everyone seems sincere and bursting with energy, yet there is a strange lack of conviction: Forman has taken the honorable route by refusing to treat the material as easy nostalgia, but the confrontational sentiments no longer have the substance to survive his straightforward presentation.

The heavy-handed delivery may reflect the urgency of the message--that women need to face the past and stand by their children--but it impedes the drama.

Lee has tried hard to give this shapeless picture some visual patterning though the cluttered effect created by his mistrust of silence is even more harmful than in the past.

Paul Mazursky hasn’t only remade Jean Renoir’s sublime 1931 Boudu Saved From Drowning: he’s yuppified it, inverting virtually every meaning until the film becomes a celebration of the crassest kind of materialism.

Dispenses so many rubber masks to allow the characters to swap identities that no hero or villain winds up carrying any moral weight at all.

Horror maestro Christophe Gans ("Brotherhood of the Wolf") directed this feature, worth seeing for the zombie nurses who gyrate like a Bob Fosse chorus line before slicing each other to ribbons.

William Friedkin's direction of this 1970 film adaptation (made the year before The French Connection) doesn't do much more than underline the flaws in the material: every scene is shaped to build to the same forced hysteria.

The color-coded cinematography is nice but the jokes are obvious and the dialogue drags whenever metaphysics gets brought up.

Various news stories have noted the movie's accuracy, which I don't doubt, but the blanket antipathy makes for a wearying and predictable story.

Naim's premise has possibilities, but its execution often feels slapdash -- the viewer's sense of deja vu may be even more excessive than the characters'.

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

Director Zack Snyder races through the story, faithfully reproducing this bit of dialogue from Moore and that bit of imagery from Gibbons but never pausing to develop a vision of his own. The result is oddly hollow and disjointed; the actors moving stiffly from one overdetermined tableau to another.