The special effects, for once, are witty rather than overblown, and director Nora Ephron, writing with her sister Delia, handles the material with some grace and confidence.

As romantic comedies go, this is the worst drivel I've seen since Nia Vardalos's "I Hate Valentine's Day."

Shelved for over a year, this incompetent mystery thriller stops periodically so some character or other can deliver an expository speech and pull the plot back on track, but by the end the story has turned into a hair ball.

Earns points for its set and sound design, eerily desaturated color palette, able cast, and one really good special effect. Sadly, the movie just doesn't deliver chills.

Writers Jon Lucas and Scott Moore steal from the best, gleefully cribbing from "A Christmas Carol" to fashion a screenplay with heart and sharp one-liners.

With all her (Bullock) grotesque disguises, this often suggests a sequel to "Mrs. Doubtfire."

A series of stunts with bears and lots of stage fighting involving characters who are unambiguously good or evil.

The consistency with which the plot turns on characterization instead of contrivance makes this movie better than many of its supposedly grown-up competitors.

Mike Reiss's witless, maudlin screenplay is like rancid leachate trickling from a Dumpster full of rotting sitcom scripts, Mary Kay sales manuals, and romance novels.

Wahlberg turns in one of his worst performances ever, but then he's saddled with preposterous scenes.

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

Whimsical fluff (1967) that weighs in on the far side of 50 tons; it's so clumsy and pounding that taking a child to it might be grounds for a visit from family services.

A first-rate Hollywood entertainment--at least if one can accept the schizophrenia of combining a cop/buddy action thriller with an angry satire about the shamelessness of the media.

Terence Stamp and Wallace Shawn spend a fair amount of time skulking around as ghostly servants, which kept me amused for the movie's 99 minutes.

This fumbling and formulaic semiremake of The Private War of Major Benson (1955) is basically just an excuse to let comic Damon Wayans—functioning here as cowriter and executive producer as well as star—strut his stuff. But he's strutting in a void, and not even two gold teeth will light his way. The initial premise [is] good for a couple of laughs at most.

Generally I don’t mind a little recreational fascism as long as it’s deep-fried in savory violent vengeance, but this overwrought mess gives vigilantism a bad name.

Nearly all the SF premises are accorded the status of Andrew Dice Clay one-liners - which means that they, along with the characters, keep changing from one scene to the next.

It accomplishes what it sets out to do, and if slasher fare is your thing, you've seen far worse.

This doesn't lack for crazy charm, particularly when Nicolas Cage (in his go-for-broke Bad Lieutenant mode) and Ciaran Hinds (playing the devil) try to out-weird each other with broad, even cartoonish performances.

Creatively it's a giant step backwards.

Nearly toothless 1998 existential drama.

I'm qualified to report that this piece of junk faithfully re-creates the Hanna-Barbera formula of scary monsters, flimsy mystery, and watery comedy.

The Rock's ungainly performance is somewhat alleviated by Karl Urban as a crew member and Rosamund Pike as his twin sister.

The vile sadism of the Saw movies has been replaced by decorative references to Saint Augustine and Immanuel Kant, and there's a beautiful but brainy police profiler (Waddell) on hand to dispense a thick layer of psychobabble.

Osunsanmi's big formal innovation tunrs out to be the split-screen pairing of patently bogus "archival" black-and-white video that shows alleged abductees undergoing hypnosis and color "reenactments" of same. Ultimately it's up to you, the viewer, to decide which is more boring.

Peter Hyams, a pretty good cinematographer but a mediocre director, goes to work on a script by Andrew W. Marlowe that's designed to carry us from one bit of hyperbole to the next.

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

There's a discernible lack of enthusiasm from almost everyone involved, and Duff, who's gone from wholesome to haggard in two short years, is flat-out scary.

The shticky dialogue undercuts the solid genre plotting, which undercuts the humor.

Soulless, hyperbolic actioner.

The cast is certainly impressive, and probably reason enough for seeing this.

This effective, well-paced antimilitary thriller has more conflicting flashbacks than you can shake a stick at.

A major washout.

But the bland plot involves nested crimes gone awry and a bad car chase or two, and its bulky, styleless exposition is hard to wait out.

As "Saw" demonstrated, Wan and Whannell have a carnivalesque sense of fun and a sure instinct for recycling classic horror tropes, but their characters are so flat and their plotting so listless that this low-budget feature fails to generate much suspense.

This is funny mostly for its brazen disregard of common sense.

This hopelessly redundant action gross-out aspires to a form of hip vacuousness--and may achieve it.

Overblown and stupefyingly dull.

Michael Mann (Miami Vice) produced this exercise in fascist chic, and it plays like a TV pilot filled out with a few cusswords and strokes of excess violence.

Valueless as entertainment, it’s still useful as a disambiguation tool for those who confuse Jessica Alba and Jessica Biel, or Taylor Dayne and Taylor Swift.

This grasping comedy targets kids of all ages but will please no one as it exploits exhausted ideas about adolescence.

The whole movie feels stiff and awkward whenever the actors stop chasing each other long enough to talk.

Two of MTV's stupidest programs, "The Real World" and "Spring Break," have been rolled into one staggeringly dumb feature film.

A promotional tool that establishes its superfluousness simply by existing, this clumsy, smirking movie has a bitter soul.

Not unlike "Eyes Wide Shut," this is an eerily earnest contemplation of fidelity, and it's pitched as farce.

This doesn't exactly set the world on fire, but I was charmed by its old-fashioned storytelling, which is refreshingly free of archness, self-consciousness, or "Kill Bill"-style wisecracks.

The result, messily directed by Jimmy Hayward, begins affably enough as a random slew of Leone-style squint-a-thons and shoot-outs but then loses it way in a dopey, anachronism-happy sci-fi plot.

Ludicrous revenge thriller.

Unafraid to look absurd but lacks the self-conviction needed to come off as camp.

This teen romance doesn't have a single authentic moment.

This operates at the intellectual level of the old "Star Trek" in its limp last season, and the professed humanism is belied by the extreme violence and Nazi-chic production design (not to mention a voice-over that traces the outlawing of emotion to "the revolutionary precept of the hate crime").

By the time Gooding showed up for one of his assignments disguised as a call girl, even "Boat Trip" looked good to me.

The sex, fart, and pot jokes come so fast and furious that a white flag seems the most appropriate response.

Frantic and unfunny.

Whereas the 1987 horror hit The Stepfather was top-notch drive-in fare, this perfunctory retread had a tame, made-for-TV feel.

Good movie roles have generally eluded her (Agnes Bruckner), and she labors in vain to keep this big-studio horror confection alive.

Unlike the many youth movies that can't overcome their makers' hindsight, this one may actually put you in an adolescent frame of mind.

In this uneven Disney comedy Adam Sandler tones down his arrested-development persona, trading crass humor for warm fuzzies.

Forgettable coming-of-age story.

Tierney and Hackman contribute most to keeping this life-size and funny.

A charming, albeit slightly overextended (even at 81 minutes) multiracial sex comedy.

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).

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

Jack Black is the title character in this thin adaptation of the Jonathan Swift classic.

The resulting mix of hagiography and war epic is so muddled that characters keep addressing each other by their first names, the better to tell them apart.

The dialogue is often grating, and some of the situations are distastefully cute, although John Carroll Lynch (Fargo) has a strong supporting turn as a grief workshop client.

The plot of this PG action thriller, a remake of the 2002 Danish film Klatretosen, is so full of holes that even middle schoolers might give it the raspberry, but a bigger problem is the three leads' lack of on-screen chemistry.

This miserable comedy is enlivened occasionally by Jeff Daniels and Kristin Chenoweth as a cheerfully tacky couple who keep crossing paths with the dysfunctional clan.

Years on the Hannah Montana TV series have not adequately prepared Miley Cyrus for screen acting.

Melissa George's performance has more Lady Macbeth in it than Kidder's.

The gags are consistently weak, though actor Miles Fisher turns in a hair-raising impression of Tom Cruise.

Suspense is fairly effective until it's stretched to the point of monotony.

Retained my interest and sympathy -- at least until the nonsensical ending,

Cutesy and unconvincing parable.

It did give me plenty of jolts and surprises.

Not particularly sensitive or funny comedy-drama.

Written and directed by Tom Six--who doesn't seem to realize that movie theaters rely on popcorn sales--this nasty stuff plays like a cross between "Saw," "Naked Lunch," and "Bride of the Monster."

Never really generates any serious laughs.

The protracted shoot-out at the end of Dear Wendy is even more pornographic than the moment when a female member of the Dandies exposes her breasts. The audience is clearly expected to enjoy the bloodbath even while it disapproves.

Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn are too good for this embarrassing remake.

Dopey but charming.

Neither good nor terrible.

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

As the characters behave with symbolic excess in situations designed to provoke their bigotry and self-interest, superficial black comedy periodically gives way to painful drama.

The only characters in this formulaic crime comedy that I halfway liked were a couple of barely glimpsed wives, but the two leads keep it going through sheer determination.

As soon as it became clear that this remake has nothing to do with real Georgia moonshiners and everything to do with car chases, smashups, and explosions, I could sit back and enjoy it as good, stupid fun.

Pretentious, boring, and consistently uninvolving, this effort by producer Robert Evans and director William Friedkin to make comebacks with an incoherent Joe Eszterhas script simply won't wash.

Ultimately the movie is alluring and respectful--its sadness may be what saves it from becoming sensationalist or trite.

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

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

This is dumb, raunchy, and obvious, but it's also pretty funny, and delivered with the gusto of a Redd Foxx monologue.

Alexa Vega, having graduated from the "Spy Kids" franchise, seems too poised to be vulnerable but too young for all her makeup.

Some of the precise meanings of this Bill Forsyth comedy eluded me, but the vibes couldn't have been nicer.

As modern rom-coms go, this is trite but relatively painless.

Considering the degree to which Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct are already self-parodies, writer David O'Malley and director Carl Reiner don't have to do much to show how silly they are; in order to understand how silly this movie is, on the other hand, all you have to do is sit through it.

There's something to be said for letting a comic book adaptation operate at the level of a comic book--i.e., with cheap laughs and ice-cold sadism.

Nicely paced but so fluffy it threatens to waft away.

The stoy makes no sense, and the two lead characters are repulsive, but I must confess I laughed immoderately at this clever piece of junk.