There's a great "Office Space"-style satire to be made about big-box stores screwing their working-poor employees, but Hollywood studios covet DVD rack space at those same stores, so instead we're supposed to get excited about which of these two idiots earns more gold stars.

The humor's vulgar and the plot feeble, but this is a cut above the gross-out comedies aimed at male teens, and its heroine and her gal pals keep the high jinks amiable.

Shafer (himself a former Playgirl centerfold) never quite manages the incisive social critique his story seems to require.

A better disaster movie than it is a thriller.

This live-action feature actually has less of a pulse than the puppet version.

Not a fraction as scary as George Romero's low-budget "Night of the Living Dead." Fans of the first installment will probably like this too--it's essentially the same movie, plus helicopters and lots of flying glass.

For this remake writer-director Neil LaBute has moved the action from Scotland to Washington State, added enough scares for Warner Brothers to market the movie as horror, and turned the story into an almost comically Wagnerian expression of the castration anxiety that snakes through his original screenplays.

Plotted densely enough to make the lulls forgivable, this movie concerns a contract killer (Bruce Willis) who employs several small-business owners to craft his super-high-tech weapons and the many accessories that enable him to assume multiple identities.

Despite the syncopated score and subtitled patois, this is just another "Scarface" knockoff, with the usual array of bling, booty, and ballistics.

The stylistic discontinuities and pile-driver excesses can be off-putting for an outsider like me, but for fans this may well be part of the appeal.

Director Steve Carr continues his streak of numbingly mediocre family comedies.

Writer-director Len Wiseman, now the star's husband, wisely moves this sequel to the countryside and wastes less time dispensing the same grog of grisly CGI combat and mythical mumbo jumbo.

The movie is so filled with such optimistic gestures that one wishes it were more convincing; the dialogue is riddled with cliches and the leads are too confident to portray teenage insecurities credibly.

Watching these old pros play longtime buddies is a pleasure, especially since they're together in most scenes. But this thriller by Jon Avnet (88 Minutes) is mostly by the numbers, and its surprise ending, though effective, feels somewhat forced.

Writer-director Peter Greenaway never uses narrative lightly...references to the act of filmmaking exhaust their impact pretty quickly.

Martial arts hero Jet Li takes on all comers--with one hand in his hip pocket most of the time--in this absurd but breathlessly paced actioner.

The little heroes and their families are surprisingly ugly, with faces resembling skulls, and the colors are so faded and muddy the movie feels tired and bungled.

It’s not the convoluted yet obvious plot of this 1998 drama about the domestic lives and criminal careers of two childhood friends (DMX and Nas) that draws you in—it’s the splendid visuals. Set mainly in New York City and Omaha, where these drug dealers do business according to their different ambitions, the movie is an image opera that deftly turns visual gimmicks into potent symbols.

Rife with the oldest and simplest pleasures of 3-D movies: all sorts of objects fly at the camera, and the climactic battle takes place over a deep, dark chasm. At its best the movie suggests a funhouse at a state-of-the-art county fair; at its worst it's a fairly dumb celebration of brute violence.

Unfortunately, the pattern has so calcified that Gene Autry westerns seem like models of moral complexity by comparison.

It's hard to think of a deadlier shotgun marriage than Jacques Tourneur's poetry of absence and Spielbergian uplift, but Shyamalan has patented the combo, adding pretentious camera movements that are peculiarly his own--even the jokes are pretty solemn.

This graphically violent film suffers from cursorily developed characters whose primary function is to advance the creaky plot.

As a movie, this sort-of sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show ain't much—but then neither was the original, and we all know how much difference that made.

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.

Strives for comprehensive coverage of its theme of forbidden love.

Writer-director Chris Ver Wiel stocks this diverting crime comedy with familar characters and formulas.

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

Gorski's script is full of catty gay banter, especially hilarious when delivered by Jay Brannan (Shortbus) as the hero's promiscuous best friend.

The film gets campier by the minute.

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.

Reminded me most of Jean Genet's "Un chant d'amour," with bondage and latex replacing incarceration and cigarettes. This is not to say that it's equally good or poetic, but the eroticizing of a whole universe is no less apparent.

Director Zak Tucker is a bit too fond of jump cuts as signifiers of edginess. Still, when the material doesn't get in the way he's pretty good at getting across the emotional content.

The video is heavy on actors and other showbiz types, and the self-centered Gurwitch doesn't distinguish between a factory worker laid off after decades on the job and an actor getting rejected during tryouts.

Once the gore and suspense take over, this becomes mechanical and unpleasant.

Absolutely nothing funny happens during their drive to Georgetown for an interview, even with Donny Osmond along for the ride.

Sitting through this barrage of all-purpose insults aimed at obvious targets was an unenlightening chore.

Another virtual-reality SF movie -- and you're not likely to care.

This high-decibel shocker is an insult to intelligence and faith alike.

Producers Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg deploy an arsenal of noisy special effects to demonstrate the invaders' high-tech superiority, which makes Olyphant's inability to breach an Internet firewall look pretty silly.

Amiable screwball comedy.

Costars John Cleese, Jean Reno, Alfred Molina, Andy Garcia, and Jeremy Irons look either bored or desperate, gasping for laughs in an airless screenplay.

A genial cast and moderately funny script prevail over the sort of sappy music cues and white-bread settings that have become the grating norm in Hollywood rom-coms.

Originality and even a certain amount of obscurity are more appealing than formula. This doesn't work, but I was never bored.

Seems more theatrical than cinematic, needing the kind of direct address that only a stage can provide.

Most of the action in this 2001 indie drama takes place on computer screens, with grainy faces framed by sharp little boxes; the 21st-century conceit is topical enough but the characters and their problems couldn't be more stale.

There are many plot complications, most designed to get us to applaud our tolerance of religious differences.

A ragbag of shopworn ideas nicked from Philip K. Dick, this sci-fi thriller never stops finding new ways to make no sense.

Misguided version of one of the Bard's best comedies.

Pegg has some good obnoxious moments, but he's only a few movies away from becoming Dudley Moore.

Hits the ground running and never looks back. But after an hour of propulsive pacing the shock value wears off, and all that's left is pop-up carnage.

The story is painfully slow.

Script and direction are both fairly slapdash, but the actors and the overall sweetness keep this chugging along on some level .

While it's loaded with visceral thrills, it never rises above the level of an extended video game or an advertisement for the military.

It's a victory of tone over storytelling, though perhaps a Pyrrhic one.

Without the grandiose narrative structure of the six live-action releases, this feels even more pointless, a mechanical attempt to milk the kids for every last dime.

The story unfolds briskly in the polished mode of a classic horror movie, then tanks after a plot twist at the midpoint alters the mood and slows the pace. Jim Sheridan (My Left Foot, In the Name of the Father) directed an ill-conceived screenplay that could have worked only as camp.

Like so many other CGI behemoths, this dull action fantasy ultimately squashes rather than inspires one's sense of wonder.

Under the circumstances, MacLaine, Costner, and Ruffalo acquit themselves well.

The special effects are better and the dialogue slightly more humorous than in the first movie, but the anti-Arab subtext is repugnant.

Writer-director Mark Brown ruptures and restores the realism in this romantic comedy with ease, dispensing earnest wisdom with a little tongue in cheek instead of undermining it with a lot of irony.

De Niro gives a crafty performance, and director John Polson (Swimfan) maintains a pleasantly low-key suspense. But the ending is a disappointment.

Translating Woolrich's pulpy obsessiveness and crazy contrivances into the stuff of light comedy is no easy matter, and the movie gets as far as it does mainly with the help of Lake and Shirley MacLaine.

I found it more pleasurable as a time waster than either "Mission: Impossible."

This realist fairy tale of impossible love has a fair amount of nuance and charm.

Director Bruce Beresford -- not intending to be funny but succeeding wildly.

So clinically detached it borders on absurd.

If you haven't lived until you've seen Laurence Fishburne and Sam Neill duke it out in a vat full of red paint, here's your chance; personally, my idea of hell would be having to see this stinker again.

Director Vicky Jenson has a sitcom script on her hands and proceeds accordingly.

The road of excess leads to the palace of boredom in this overblown monster epic.

The screenplay for this 1985 feature is so riddled with character inconsistencies and unmotivated behavior that it plays like science fiction: the unsuspected presence of body-snatching aliens is the only conceivable explanation for the bizarre twists of psychology the film proposes.

Its ponderous explanations about why there are vampires in Arizona in the new millennium (blah, blah, blah).

Underneath the wrapping lies a squalid Tarantino-style crime flick.

This story line turns out to be a put-on, and the latter half of the movie is a tedious mockumentary exercise.

The main pleasure of this high-stakes-poker drama is watching a septuagenarian Burt Reynolds effortlessly revive his 70s screen persona as a strutting paragon of male shrewdness and sexuality.

For most of the running time I was mainly confused, as well as mildly nauseated by the gross-out details of a tale that tends to be more slimy than scary.

It's a great-looking film, filled with wildly imaginative sets and costumes that would have done the Maestro proud, and veteran director Richard Fleischer (The Vikings) rises to the occasion with some sharply staged action scenes. With Nielsen's minimal English rubbing up against the fractured locutions of costar Arnold Schwarzenegger, the dialogue passages don't exactly play like Noel Coward, but this is a movie that succeeds rousingly well on its own humble, Saturday-night terms.

Sappy.

With minimalist and universal fantasies as their points of departure, the superheroic deeds evolve only incrementally beyond the realistic -- a deeply satisfying process.

In 20 Dates Myles Berkowitz strings together one embarrassing moment after another and triumphs in a culture characterized by actorly artifice.

Using blasts of shrill, high-decibel noise in place of actual scares has become a common horror-movie tactic, the cinematic equivalent of botox, silicone, and penile-enhancement surgery. Producer Michael Bay and director Samuel Bayer deploy the tactic so regularly in this remake of Wes Craven's 1984 classic that after a while I just plugged my ears.

The elaborate climax set in a Paris bakery is the least boring part of this trained-animal movie.

It's amiable and smartly paced, if noticeably lacking in conviction.

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.

Has some of the ring of truth, even though the movie lingers far too long over its own epiphanies.

Grating romantic comedy.

Director Alexandre Aja (Haute Tension, The Hills Have Eyes) keeps the suspense tight for most of the movie, only to fritter it away in an overblown ending.

This comedy is a bilge pump of tacky jokes, fake sentiment, and hollow performances, accompanied on the soundtrack by lite rock and hokey music cues. It should never have been made, though it's probably guaranteed a long life at bad-film festivals.

In the finest tradition of adolescent identification figures, he's not only ruthless, dispatching numerous baddies with hair-trigger shots to the head, but profoundly desexualized, brushing off the insistent come-ons of a slinky prostitute (Olga Kurylenko) he's taken under his wing.

Lichtenstein dutifully unpacks the family's unhappy past, but he's so easily distracted by surreal dream sequences and colorful supporting characters that his main story gradually dries up into a sitcom.

Intriguing but poorly executed ideas are the basis of this not entirely unappealing romantic comedy.

"Friday" had moments of stoned charm and telling neighborhood detail; this second sequel never gets beyond the angry, cruel, and misogynist.

The story doesn't arc so much as unspool like a stretch of desert highway, but the Ghost Rider is such a powerful amalgam of hot-rod iconography that this is still fairly watchable.

The film itself regresses, starting in the present and winding up with a cautionary ending that evokes the hokiest SF movies of the 50s.

This one is overblown, over-dressed, and grandiosely dopey, packed with gargantuan sets and ludicrous action scenes and shot in unusually dark and dingy 3-D.

Buffeted by the usual car crashes and explosions, Wilson and Murphy never develop any comic chemistry.

By the time the fighting between clones and their originals turned to fraternal bonding, I was quite moved, even blissed out.

Nothing quite works as it should: the rhythms are subtly off, the pace is forced, the comedy overextended . . . and the surfeit of hommages—to the Keystone Kops and Laurel and Hardy and Jerry Lewis and all and sundry—threatens to sink it before it gets out of the starting gate. But there's something to be said for Edwards's insatiable overreaching, and at times the orchestration of pratfalls and comic pairings could hardly be more deft.

Ulliel, the meek missing soldier in "A Very Long Engagement," makes such a tedious Lecter that this quickly becomes a chore, though Dominic West ("The Wire") is good as a French detective on the madman's trail.