A stuck chairlift just doesn't exert the same primal terror as a roiling sea, and to make up the difference, Green would need a better cast and sharper dialogue than he has here.

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.

Mixing horror and comedy while minimizing the gore, writer-director Paul Weitz (About a Boy) serves up a witty adventure fantasy with a tasty dollop of schadenfreude.

Despite (or maybe because of) his obligatory nods to Hitchcock, this is slick and entertaining enough to work quite effectively as thriller porn, even with two contradictory denouements to its mystery (take your pick--or rather, your ice pick).

Turns out to be entertaining but shticky.

Cox and three others have produced a swift and economical script, but it's just porn with a different money shot--not graphic violence per se but the sort of blood-soaked crime scene that sells true-crime paperbacks.

Paul Bartel's "Death Race 2000" is a beloved camp item, but this slick, loud, violent remake is pitched at the video game crowd.

Based on the novel by T.D. Jakes, this is a queasy mix of comedy, melodrama, and self-help spirituality; it's meant to be uplifting, but its profamily message is undercut by its virulently misogynistic treatment of the realtor and her mother (Jenifer Lewis), both too shrewish and controlling to be believed.

He's a fascinating character (even in the person of Gerard Butler), but his conversion from drug-crazed bruiser to psalm-singing family man is so swift and unconvincing that the movie is hobbled from the start. It becomes more engrossing once Childers finds his mission in Africa.

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

It goes beyond sympathy and authenticity to insight as it examines the plight of a man who loves a man but feels he must love a woman.

Outlandish but gripping paranoid thriller.

Registers as frighteningly typical and indicates how successful the Bush administration has been at convincing Americans that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 and armed with weapons of mass destruction.

Milius has nothing to say: this 1982 film only hints at the romantic heroics of "The Wind and the Lion" and has none of the personal quality of "Big Wednesday."

It wasn't so bad, aside from the god-awful ending; at the very least Freundlich manages to come up with funnier jokes than the ossified one-liners decorating Allen's recent movies.

The movie hits a surprising range of emotional grace notes, including several moments of genuine regret, and concludes with an understated moral lesson about the value of self-respect over social status, something that would never happen in an Allen film.

The kind of ugly-duckling role that's long been ironic for her (Bullock).

If there were any more cops on the edge in this arrhythmic, ham-fisted crime drama, Brooklyn would need a bigger edge.

The fundamental problems with David Cronenberg's disastrous 1993 adaptation, written by Hwang himself, are twofold: the unsuitability of such a premise for film, where the actors and audience no longer share the same space, and the miscasting of Jeremy Irons as the accountant and John Lone as the diva.

Provocative but also infuriating, this alarmist documentary argues that the levying of a federal income tax in 1913 was unconstitutional and set America on the road to fascism.

Mimi Leder directed Michael Schiffer's script, handling some of the action sequences deftly enough to promote the latent idea that people who don't speak English don't deserve to live.

A cute send-up of preadolescent stereotypes.

This Indiana Jones knockoff goes down smoothly enough, and Jolie isn't bad at all, though every time she opened her mouth I expected Mick Jagger to come dancing down her tongue.

Andrews is still a treasure, but the series's currency is plummeting.

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'.

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

What's left is the framework for a graphic, brutal, sickening film (1980), without the violent effects that might have made sense (however illegitimate) out of the conception. Like The Exorcist, it alternates five minutes of shock with ten minutes of dull exposition, plenty of time to watch Al Pacino wrestle with his miserably conceived character.

This forced spoof seems to be targeted at lesbian couples and hetero men with severe schoolgirl fetishes; that may be a legitimate market, but I'd hate to be sitting between them.

In this lavish adaptation of Lisa See's novel, the complex chronologies of the parallel narratives are skillfully handled by director Wayne Wang, which makes his reliance on unbridled sentimentality all the more irritating.

Hovers just this side of "Ghost Whisperer" kitsch but remains compulsively watchable thanks to its smart ensemble cast

Seems like a dopey idea to me, but if you aren't familiar with the Fitzgerald novel, you may enjoy this; at least Jones and his costars play the story as if they believed in it.

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

As old-fashioned movie fun, this isn't bad, even -- especially? -- when it skirts the edge of silliness, and it's better than the 1960 George Pal version.

At first I thought I was watching yet another version of "A Christmas Carol"; then I wondered if it was a remake of "It's a Wonderful Life"; finally I gave up trying to find anything at all in it that was unfamiliar.

Impressively nuanced.

It's not a sex movie but a parody, and the loose feel is part of its genius.

Armitage adds a slick veneer of one-liners and slapstick to Leonard's novel, but the story has been so spun around that it barely knows how to end.

Bay Area filmmaker Jon Moritsugu (Fame Whore, Mod Fuck Explosion) is known for his angry, manic energy, but the characters in this video, denizens of the San Francisco art fringe, seem like they're heavily sedated.

As usual, blood flows freely and gratuitously, but you could do worse.

Wasn't worth Allen's time and isn't worth yours.

After a sluggish half hour, this well-crafted adventure kicks into high gear and never lets up.

Brian De Palma's 1992 thriller borders on incoherence and irrelevance as plot, but as a chance for De Palma to perform stylistic pirouettes around a void, it's full of sleek and pleasurable moments.

Their relationship is so subtly inflected with fear, envy, and self-loathing on both sides of the class divide that I was drawn in nonetheless. Brody is a compelling presence throughout.

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.

While the level of imagination here is scaled to the bite-size dimensions of TV, the sense of an alternate universe felt in Herman's TV show is woefully lacking. But fans and undemanding kids may still be amused.

Kline gives an interesting performance playing against type, but with its action plotting and sensationalistic scenes of women being brutalized, the movie often seems to be exploiting as much as illuminating the problem.

Contrasting the erotic with the disgusting is usually provocative and can be funny, but not in this underdog comedy.

I don't doubt the noble motives behind this Disney parable, but the attempts at amiable, laid-back dialogue (script by Gerald DiPego) are painful, the pacing is sluggish, and the confused story's poorly focused.

Goldblum and Murphy outdo each other in their odd roles, each minimizing his tendency toward shtick and giving a convincing dramatic performance.

Overwhelmingly grisly.

This multigenre parody is excruciatingly slow and unamusing; a go-go dancer in the opening and closing credits does as much in a few minutes to shake up our perspective on a bygone aesthetic as the entire narrative in between.

Bland comedy romance. Grant and Bullock fail to put across the tired dialogue, and many scenes seem ad-libbed--in desperation.

Unfortunately I can't give this a thumbs-up or thumbs-down; I haven't yet developed an aesthetic that will accommodate a guy firing a bottle rocket from his ass.

Isn't terribly frightening or gory, and at times it's even atmospheric. It also has a sense of humor, and the digs at the prequels hit pay dirt.

Little remains of the original but its weakest element - its overelaborate intrigue - and Hackford seems only to scramble it further.

Woody Allen at his most inconsequential and insubstantial; don't expect to remember this black-and-white throwaway of comic sketches five minutes after it's over.

This is a pretty stupid comedy in spots, with holes wide enough to drive trucks through, and director Arthur Hiller is as clunky as ever, but the cast is so funny and likable—above all, costars Jim Belushi and Charles Grodin, and newcomer Loryn Locklin—that they almost bring it off in spite of itself.

Nobody seems to know quite what he's doing in this opulent but fairly empty period fashion show, apart from campy overactors like Christopher Walken and Jonathan Pryce who appear eager to fill the voids left by their colleagues.

Poorly acted, over-the-top, and generally out-of-control bloodbath.

The childish humor and sensationalistic effects undercut the movie's philosophical agenda.

Intelligent, moving, but annoyingly self-satisfied.

Unfortunately this is much tamer than it had to be--Rudnick Lite, meaning on the edge of evaporation.

With a distinctively middle-aged zest, Carpenter retools even the hopeless cliche requiring action heroes to spout bad puns while dispatching bad guys; his eminently stylish movie proves that new blood can flow from an old vein.

Even as you're wincing at what you thought was misguided earnestness, it's being subverted by filmmakers who've turned many of the genre's weaknesses into tiny triumphs.

A curdled, unfunny satire made more painful by McGrath’s inappropriately jubilant style.

Not wishing to spoil the fun -- pretty hard to come by anyway in this 1998 blockbuster's 150 minutes -- I won't tell you the outcome, but I'll wager you can guess.

This 1979 teenage horror film has no redeeming style: it's a straight, pedestrian cop of Halloween, from the opening shock to the climactic battle against the psycho.

I don't know if Rob Reiner is the one to blame for this atrocity, but he directed and coproduced.

Like so many secular, big-studio Christmas comedies, this isn't naughty enough to be funny or nice enough to be uplifting; it's just an ugly sweater from a distant relative, thoughtlessly sent and destined to be thrown away.

No movie star appears to have more fun in a crap movie than John Travolta, and his inimitable my-check-has-cleared! glee is the best thing about this lame espionage thriller.

By the time the high-octane ending arrived I didn't even care what happened to the kid.

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

The musical sequences are good enough that they make you wish Ross had been willing to leave the surface realism behind and break out into the high stylization and exuberance of the genre's classic days. Despite the hesitations, it's miles above "Flashdance" in technique and intelligence.

If you're going to make a movie in which some of your stars are animated toys and much of downtown Chicago is reduced to rubble, this is the way to do it: shamelessly, with no expense spared and no cliche avoided.

This leads to some fairly amusing gags involving surreal ads for actual products (e.g., for Jaguar: “Sleek and smart. For men who'd like hand jobs from beautiful women they hardly know”). Moore's boss is so horrified by this development that he sends him to a sanitarium, at which point the movie takes an abrupt nosedive into the sort of tacky media lies it is supposedly attacking.

Dead-on imitations of some of the characters from the television series created by Bob Mosher and Joe Connelly will seem pointlessly stylized to viewers unfamiliar with the old sitcom.

The humor is often predictable--minor characters are stereotyped only to be demeaned for easy laughs--but the movie impressively fulfills its larger purpose of making you look at your culture's conventions as such.

Cruddy, primal, extremely violent, and fairly entertaining, this 1984 feature from the New York-based exploitation outfit Troma, Inc. (Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz) captures some of the snot-flicking spirit of the old EC comics. How much you'll enjoy its deliberate crudity probably depends on how far you can let yourself regress to surly adolescence.

Well-meaning but thick with cliches.

Screenwriter Marc Moss can take credit for the film's laughable dialogue.

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

Screenwriters David Johnson and Alex Mace deliver one of the stupidest "twist endings" in the history of storytelling.

The remake is plenty scary, though any moral inquiry into the cost of revenge seemed to fly over the heads of the screaming, laughing crowd I saw it with.

When the story finally collapses in a heap at the end, you'll probably want your money back, but that's where the title comes in: "Next!"

If old-fashioned jolts are what you're after, this nasty piece of merchandise delivers. But so does electroshock.

As on their TV collaboration, "That '70s Show," the time period never extends much farther than hairdos, costume design, and soundtrack hits.

The supposedly cunning protagonist registers as a cipher, and the directors' tendency to shoot dialogue scenes in close-up blunts any understanding of the social milieu he's trying to conquer.

Sandler is disarming and compelling as Sonny.

Despite the practical nature of the costars' bond, I spent most of the lukewarm actioner wondering when the hell they were going to start kissing.

The CGI is excellent, with characters whose depth and solidity suggest Nick Park's clay animations.

Good, amusing, disreputable fun—until it starts getting solemn and preachy.

The nonstop action in this British romp should ensure that its target audience, sugar-buzzed prepubescent boys, stay strapped in their seats.

This is gold-plated navel gazing in the worst 60s style.

It's bleak, creepy, and occasionally terrifying. Studio pressure apparently forced Murch to back off from the full fury of his conception, but this is still strong stuff.

This Farrelly brothers "hommage" replicates the mechanics of their work without echoing its spirit or complex tone, and many of the deliberate offenses fail to transcend mere exploitation.

The murder-mystery board game becomes a frantic, unfunny spoof (1985) under the direction of British TV writer Jonathan Lynn. The script recycles Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians, with six guests invited by a mysterious host to spend the night in a creepy mansion, but instead of parodying the material Lynn simply surrounds it with extraneous pratfalls and wisecracks.

This historical drama is lovely to look at, with elegant Victorian fashions and verdant tropical scenery, but its story plays like a Hawaiian heritage lesson filtered through the melodramatic artifice of an old Hollywood costume drama.

Proof positive of just how mediocre 70s mediocrity could be—any quasicompetent Hollywood hack of the 40s could have gone to town with this story, but under Yates's direction it merely lurches along, from one predictable danger to another.