Not bad to look at, but consistently unedifying.

Betty Thomas, directing a script by TV veteran Jeff Lowell, seems uncertain whether to sympathize with her three heroines or with the title cad, but there's something mildly charming about this cheerful revenge comedy's lack of any straightforward moral agenda.

This lame comedy was adapted from a recent British TV movie, though its (quite literal) money shots of the women squealing and hurling cash in the air reminded me of 80s greed capers like "Trading Places" and "A Fish Called Wanda."

The lawyer is marvelously played by Evelina Fernandez, who wrote the screenplay based on her play.

Nothing miraculous, but it's time pretty well spent.

For all the high-tech allusions and middle-tech illusions, the movie--the 23rd in an immortal series--draws its power from its grittiness and unresolved allegory.

As an "Animal House" romp about consumer slackers in a New Jersey mall, it's harmless enough--just don't expect any sort of edge. Smith has left the working class to become just as boring as everybody else.

Even though Kristy is seen mainly through the uncomprehending eyes of Jake, McGovern manages to fare better with the cliches thrown at her than Bacon does; but neither has a prayer of scoring at a game whose rules and players might have been dreamed up by a computer. Even the cutesy minor gag of putting the title's initials on the hero's license plate has something grimly nonhuman about it.

Once the special effects take over, Berg has little room to assert his personality (or tell a story, for that matter), and the movie feels like a chore.

Pleasant bubblegum romp, which was inspired by the old Sandra Dee picture "The Reluctant Debutante."

The "Big Fat Wedding" formula dictates a certain amount of ugly-duckling fantasy along with the ethnic scenery chewing.

Delivers state-of-the-art freeway thrills tenuously held together by an absurd plot, cheap but pretty leads (Martin Henderson, Monet Mazur), diner and gas station locations that look like they've been preserved in amber since the 1950s, and plenty of engine porn.

The ostensible humor here is of the macho one-liner variety, and much of it falls flat. There is just too much Ratso and Cowboy for us to believe in Butch and Sundance.

Director Paul Morrison forfeits any meaningful statement about art for a pedestrian coming-out story, based in part on Dali's unreliable, self-aggrandizing memoirs.

The gender-bending comedy of Billy Wilder and Blake Edwards gets a teenpic makeover in this 2005 debut feature by Martin Curland.

Val Kilmer, clearly pleased to be entering the Oscar disability sweepstakes, does what he can as the hunk who learns how to see.

The received notion that kids want their movies fast and furious is barely in evidence in this 1997 comedy, a laboriously slow suburban adventure.

Everything wrong with today's hipster comedy seems to coalesce in this toothless satire.

There aren't that many laugh-out-loud jokes in this comedy, yet Billy Bob Thornton's portrayal of ass-kicking gym coach Mr. Woodcock is almost worth the price of admission.

Smarter than its predecessor, the movie aims for the "High School Musical" market.

This melodrama by writer-director Tommy Stovall has a good premise, but he undercuts it with contrived plot twists, pedestrian pacing, and mostly two-dimensional characters.

Director Ry Russo-Young, who cowrote the script with Schnabel, is gunning for a big generational statement, but her ordnance is strictly small bore.

Geek-triumphs-after-all comedies can be charming, but in this one the triumphing begins so early it's hard to feel for the geek.

This gently satirical farce is atmospheric when dabbling in religion--the chef turns to spiritual magic to defuse her passion for her husband--and moving during her heart-to-hearts with her friend.

An extravagant waste of resources.

Though the film lacks the frantic imagination of its inspiration, Robert Rodriguez's "Spy Kids" franchise, grade-schoolers should still enjoy its fresh-scrubbed humor and fantasies of youthful omnipotence.

The movie gets off to a weak start, but the jokes get progressively more bent.

Despite the lowbrow story, this is supposed to be tasteful; expect modest nudity, swelling strings, and plenty of water imagery.

This heist comedy has a hackneyed introduction, and its feel-good ending lacks credibility, but the big, funny chunk in the middle marks writer-director-producer David E. Talbert as a talent to watch.

With its flashy, pretentious visual effects, this is really a 98-minute dream sequence--though it's worth recalling that the most effective dream sequences tend to be only a few minutes long.

A turkey of Rubenesque proportions.

The songs are shrill and cloying (if mercifully forgettable), the choreography is embarrassing, and the comedy sets a new global standard for puerility--and not in a fun way.

This schizoid college comedy veers between gross-out humor and earnest coming-of-age drama.

A few of the bad-taste gags are funny, and Carrey's grimaces have a certain inspired delirium, but this is a long way from the social comedy of Jerry Lewis.

This UK drama by Stephen Woolley, a longtime producer for Neil Jordan making his directing debut, presents a fairly convincing version of what might have happened.

Isn't really a satire of Hollywood so much as a chance for Short's wealthy showbiz buddies (Steve Martin, Kurt Russell, Kevin Kline, Whoopi Goldberg) to poke very gentle fun at themselves and stick it to the press.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the historical premise for this Indiana Jones knockoff.

In the early scenes, Landis and Goldblum work hard to make the character's depression dramatically real, and this infusion of gravity in a generally weightless genre brings a new meaning to the standard action scenes. But the idea vanishes around the midway mark—at about the point when the sun comes up—and the balance of the film is thin and familiar.

Jarmusch makes some effort to deliver on the promise of suspense near the end, with de Bankole stalking despicable businessman Bill Murray at his fortresslike compound in the hills.

McCann's tone, perversely comic at first, gradually darkens, transforming this into a savage noir exploration of the war between the sexes.

The buildup to social criticism in what at first appears to be pointless and partly misogynist exploitation is subtly impressive.

Queasily suspended between drag theatrics (Faye Dunaway and Brenda Vaccaro camping it up on a soundstage replica of a carnival spook house) and Spielbergian wholesomeness (Canadian Helen Slater as a toothy, Aryan Ubermadchen), this is one comic-book feature that doesn't fly.

The problem is that the imagery—as Sadean as Pasolini's Salo—isn't rooted in any story impulse, and so its power dissipates quickly. The real venue for this film is either a grind house or the Whitney Museum.

It's been a month since I attended a preview, and I'm more grateful than sorry that I no longer remember it well. Drug thrillers and revenge plots bore me.

Fairly strong on period atmospherics, but it mainly adds up to yet another pointless adaptation of a literary standby.

In this inept thriller...the script is a coloring book, and the director's careful to stay within the lines.

A vicious, incoherent shoot-'em-up.

Part of the idea here was to play in the ambiguous zones where Las Vegas tackiness, LSD hallucinations, Gilliam beasties, and lots of vomit become difficult to separate.

Formulaic sass machine... I was writhing in my seat.

This is marginally better than most, with a few offbeat comic ideas, a reliably droll performance from Vaughn, and, as the parents, four watchable old troupers in search of a fat paycheck.

Doesn't make a lick of sense, and its borderline racism and sexism will offend plenty of people. But comedy is all salesmanship, and these guys sold me; their giddy nonchalance reminds me of kids competing to crack each other up at bedtime after mom has given them Pepsi with dinner.

This is mildly entertaining for its cheery sacrilege (crucifixes that turn into throwing stars, etc), but once the premise has been rolled out, the movie is about as surprising to watch as the Stations of the Cross.

Initially this struck me as something you'd take your grandmother to see, but by the end it seemed more like something your grandmother would take her grandmother to see.

Formulaic but fairly well-done.

A loud and often stupid action thriller in which director Thomas Carter (Swing Kids) has every screaming psycho killer and every hysterical hostage behaving identically. Lots of car crashes, one superb explosion, and the fleeting charms of Carmen Ejogo (Absolute Beginners) hardly compensate for the overall unpleasantness, in which sadism is taken for granted and no character is allowed to develop. The idiotic script is by Randy Feldman.

Pistol-packing De Jesus evokes Pam Grier in spots but certainly holds her own.

Writer-director Howard McCain bids fair to dethrone Uwe Boll as the king of crap action flicks, and every second feels like time on the cross.

Pales in comparison to the controversial "Life Is Beautiful"--a more provocative fiction, if only because it's even less realist.

It bored me clean out of my wits.

In one slack exchange, Del Toro intimates that the government wants to shut him up because he knows too much, but apparently someone decided that this thing was silly enough already and the matter was dropped.

Bennett is also self-indulgent, giving us few clues as to what's behind this destructively hedonist behavior; instead we get shortcut insights as she and the men confess into the camera.

Unexpectedly witty and affecting exposé of the American beauty industry.

In nearly every scene of her dangerously underwritten role, Diaz has a mouthful of cliches.

More of the same, though a lot coarser than its immediate predecessor, and the characters and situations have now calcified to the point where they're simply sitcom staples.

Demands to be treated with conviction as parody if not as science fiction.

Harsh but moving drama.

The director's familiarity with silent cinema enhances the prudish pornographic footage, but when he starts cutting between separate perversions, I began to wonder if he was getting as bored with the material as I was.

If you're up for good nihilist entertainment, look no further.

The visual style--the orange-and-blue color scheme, the elegant 'Scope compositions, the graceful tracking shots, and the shrewd use of shallow focus--has been reproduced almost perfectly from John Carpenter's original, yet the wit and intelligence are gone.

The film runs through most of Leni Riefenstahl's bag of tricks as it builds up a patriotic frenzy, yet the crazed flag-waving would be a lot easier to take if it weren't so clearly a commercial calculation meant to salvage what is otherwise a crass, careless, shamelessly padded film.

Cox has some wonderfully funny moments, but both actors are playing heavily to type.

Watching this thriller is like drinking milk that's about to turn: it looks OK but smells a little dodgy.

The filmmakers show habitual thriller viewers some respect by condensing the background story into iconic sound and image bites during the opening-credits sequence, suggesting they know we get the drill; this and the other stylish elements make it all the more disappointing that the movie's mediocre.

Fortunately for the company, Largo turns out to be a formidable knife fighter in the corporate sense; fortunately for this sleek, empty thriller, he turns out to be a formidable knife fighter in the street sense too.

Though praised when it came out (1930), Alfred Hitchcock’s film of Sean O’Casey’s play, with some of the original Dublin cast (including Sara Allgood as Juno), is a fairly deadly case of canned theater that’s pretty close to what Hitchcock many years later would refer to as “photographs of people talking.”

The stock characters and leaden stretches of expository dialogue are welcome evidence that there's still no computer program capable of telling a decent story.

Its main source is a comic book, but it might as well be a computer.

Failing to provide any insight into his plight as a rich African-American celebrity, he moves on to the hard stuff.

The writers must have racked their brains for the formula: two parts other movies to one part childhood revenge fantasies

Chillingly beautiful cinematography makes the state's landscapes appear timeless as it sets the stage for a grim history told with archival portraits.

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 movie contemporizes teen-sex comedies like "Porky's" and "American Pie": when the witless nerd gets caught with his proverbial pants down, the footage ends up on YouTube with an astonishing number of hits.

The scenes set on earth--messy, predictable satire about the commercial exploitation of fevered genius. The unconscious/underworld scenes may be boring because neosurrealism is a cliche.

It may not be “The Bridges of Madison County,” but the latest Kevin Costner romance is nearly as good as they get.

There are some striking visuals and Hartnett is a magnetic presence.

The movie is essentially a pastiche, as musty as a flea market.

Allen Coulter (Hollywoodland) directed this morose and sluggish drama, which gets more mileage from Pattinson's anguished profile than from Will Fetters's thunderously overwritten screenplay.

Michael Chiklis (of the cop show "The Shield") steals the movie as the agonized Thing.

The movie seems unusually honest in portraying the no-option existence of the working poor, but the story slips into melodrama in the last reel.

Despite a three-hour running time Stone is too occupied with psychodrama to explore Alexander's innovations in battle, and Farrell, clearly out of his depth, seems less a leader of men than a Hellenistic James Dean.

It doesn't display an ounce of planning or simple craftsmanship (the Jamaican locations are photographed to look like the banks of Lake Calumet), but with a cast like that, it can't help but have its moments.

A fair amount of visual panache, but the fight scenes are routine, the humor juvenile, and the Toronto locales rendered drab through muddy cinematography.

This moves back and forth between slightly clever and dopey or silly, kept vaguely watchable by the charming leads.

The fourth installment in the horror-parody franchise combines plot elements from "The Grudge," "The Village," and "War of the Worlds," with abbreviated spoofs of "Saw," "Brokeback Mountain," and "Million Dollar Baby." The amount of screen time allotted to each movie is roughly proportional to its box office take, suggesting that the first draft of the screenplay was written on a calculator.

Franklin J. Shaffner's deadpan adaptation of Ira Levin's silly story about Hitler clones. The plot is less suspenseful than the overacting contest between the two leads, Laurence Olivier and Gregory Peck, who spend most of their screen time one-upping each other in affectations.

It runs like a Swiss watch, though the plot continuously turns on Cage's liberal interpretation of ridiculously cryptic clues.

Director Jonas Pate should be run through a wood chipper for daring to quote "Fargo."

The result is an insufferable academic cocktail party of declamatory speeches coaxed to life in its middle stretch by the incredible Maria Bello, who wades in like a paramedic at a disaster scene.