Although I have no facts to support my impression, this erotic courtroom thriller looks as if it grew out of Madonna seeing Basic Instinct and saying, “I wanna do one of those."

The characters seem both reduced and idealized, and the plot has turns a dispassionate dramatist would avoid.

Aside from a few good zingers the humor is crude and homophobic, and you could drive an ATV through the holes in the plot.

This ensemble drama by screenwriter David Hubbard isn't perfect, but its harsh honesty and sincere faith in humanity make it genuinely uplifting.

With her tetchy screen persona, Sandra Bullock is well served by brainteasers like "The Lake House" and this passable thriller about a woman who seems to be bouncing between two alternate realities.

Flimsy transformation comedy.

It's predictable stuff, though with a nice old-fashioned edge.

As the seconds tick down to midnight, Arkin becomes a reluctant hero trapped by a masked Collector in a maze of lethal invention--the Spanish Inquisition as imagined by Rube Goldberg--while trying to rescue the very family he came to rob.

Not to raise anyone’s hopes too high, but Gene Wilder has finally made a film you can watch without wanting to exit before it’s over.

People frequently cover the camera lens with their hands or refer to the "documentary" being filmed, as if to assure us that what we're seeing is real.

The laughs and emotional moments are so weak that director Jonas Elmer has no choice but to tweak them with music cues and bland guitar-rock.

This big-budget adventure is based on a recent Michael Crichton thriller, though its premise is too stale to instill the sense of wonder critical to great sci-fi.

Corrupt warden, sadistic guards, new inmate debauched by her surroundings, prison-break hostage drama--could have come straight from an old George Raft vehicle.

May persuade you to identify not with race-car drivers but with race cars.

One very sick and messed-up movie.

It isn't bad enough to be good.

Among the other characters are an African-American TV writer (Kali Hawk) who hates black people and a widower (Erik Palladino) who stumbles onto a kidnapping case. The latter development provides the film with a denouement that's dramatically valid if overly neat.

"Soppy" doesn't begin to describe this 2004 drama by Quentin Lee.

On the one hand, the action stuff is surprisingly imaginative and well filmed; on the other, the characters are the usual bunch of self-parodic dodoes that the post-Spielberg action cinema has accustomed us to, so it's impossible to believe in the situations anyway.

The material is familiar, the Berkeley locations are strictly boilerplate, and there are times when the characters seem more like high school students than college kids.

Dumb.

Director Jeannot Szwarc strains hard for spectacular visual effects, though he's barely able to compose a competent close-up.

With its pathetic characters, questionable logic, and wall-to-wall Beethoven, the movie is a serious contender for this year's Golden Turkey award.

The movie occasionally makes an unexpectereference -- though with more desperation than wit.

Sorry deep-sea adventure.

Like an idiot, I came to this movie hoping that director Catherine Hardwicke-who made her debut with the bad-girl shocker "Thirteen" (2003)-might engage in a feminist interrogation of the old fairy tale, just as French filmmaker Catherine Breillat has with "Blue Beard" (2009) and "The Sleeping Beauty" (2010). Instead this is a muddle-headed horror flick.

Whimsical fantasy tends to work best when its premise is used sparingly, but in this case the fantasy element takes over the story, becoming mechanical and often confused.

I never thought I'd see a slapstick animal action movie about the beauty of interracial relationships and nonmarital sex, but that's what this is, and kids seem to love it.

It's hard to be diverted by a tale whose emblematic romances and terminal cuteness serve an agenda that seems particularly dated today.

It's tempting to accuse director and star Kevin Costner of taking the idea of vanity production to a new level in this frontier adventure based on a book by David Brin.

A watchable but not very memorable comedy-drama.

The remake begins with the same premise and appropriates the most striking visuals, grafting them onto a more explicable but equally dull George Romero-style doomsday scenario.

It's clear that writer Akiva Goldsman and director Joel Schumacher are bereft of ideas and using the MTV clutter as a cover-up.

Breillat's mix of dramatic skill and feminist intimidation has cowed plenty of critics in the past, but no political agenda could redeem this movie's joyless pedantry.

Bitchy cheerleaders and swimming pool catfights are just two of the tedious cliches propping up this brittle comedy.

The movie's "Beverly Hillbillies" humor had me laughing moderately, and by the end I wasn't even looking around to make sure no one noticed.

It’s a heart-tugging scenario undermined by a striking hypocrisy: obscuring a hot-button issue in casting, some actors with Down's syndrome have minor roles, while Penn plays the lead -- and chews the scenery.

This serious if assaultively stylish meditation on faith uses traditional elements of religion-based horror in a way that's more innocent than calculating.

Oscillates bewilderingly between contrived and insightful, mechanical and sincere, clumsy and graceful.

A better name for it would have been the Herschell Gordon Lewis: the godfather of gore himself couldn't have topped this succession of grisly deaths.

While the results are both cheerful and occasionally inventive, they can't hold a candle to his previous features; too many jokey asides and cameos - not to mention an overdose of plot - keep getting in the way.

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).

The plot twists are mostly predicated on the characters' improbably shifting loyalties, the sort of thing you can get away with only when the people in your movie are drained of all compassion.

Huyck's direction is resolutely uninvolved—every shot of every arrhythmically paced scene cries out for instant anonymity—and only Jeffrey Jones's sardonic scenery chewing as an archetypally deranged scientist keeps things marginally watchable. Lea Thompson is completely out of her element as Howard's sexpot girlfriend (though graduated, thankfully, from the treacly virginality of SpaceCamp), and as for the guy(s) in the duck suit . . . well, he/they deserve our condolences and prayers.

Director Joe Roth (Streets of Gold) seems content with recycling the negative charms of the '84 original and hoping that nobody will notice or care. Roth's no stranger to coarse enthusiasms (he produced the amiably crass Bachelor Party, as energetic as it was inept), but this one's on automatic pilot all the way.

Slick and effective escapism with a touch of poetry (a la "The Sixth Sense") that left me vaguely dissatisfied once the mystery was supposedly resolved.

A forced screwball comedy for teenagers, partly redeemed by Brittany Murphy's giddy performance.

A tedious, lamebrained horror movie, which begins with the promising premise of a haunted house in the suburbs (poltergeists in the barbecue pit?) and quickly degenerates into a display of pretentious camera angles by director Stuart Rosenberg.

Wacky mix-ups and a stunningly unfunny climax.

The sort of thing that makes you wish you were playing a video game instead.

The feature has some lovely effects.

An intermittently enjoyable bad movie that never knows when to stop.

The rationale behind this unattractive animated comedy, a U.S.-German coproduction, seems to be that since it can't create a fairy-tale world of its own, it might as well riffle through many of the more familiar ones, with particular emphasis on Cinderella's, pretending to deconstruct them with postmodernist glosses, adolescent wisecracks, and a few high-tech anachronisms.

As usual, Cage alternates between leaden line readings and thunderous outbursts, making his accomplished costars Ulrich Thomsen and Stephen Campbell Moore look even better.

Director Robert Luketic telegraphs every dismal comic beat from Venus and Mars, then reinforces them with a twinkling, leering score.

This one follows the depressing pattern of "Surviving Christmas" and "Christmas With the Kranks": enforced holiday cheer gives way to bilious hatred, then hollow forgiveness.

A witless whack at sci-fi fanboys.

A sunny, gentle action yarn with numbingly repetitive chase scenes and bouncy interludes of playtime.

More of the abundant sight gags and slips of the tongue originate in bathrooms and bedrooms than are actually set there.

Never gets around to explaining how he (Michael Morra) picked up the moniker Rockets Redglare. In fact, the intimacy of this portrait may be a disadvantage.

The cinematic debut of Chicago theater director Marc Rosenbush, this 2004 indie comedy is an irritating exercise in ham acting, metaphysical patter routines, and rim-shot-style comic editing.

The premise is patently ridiculous, but the target audience of 12-year-old girls will be too charmed by the genre requisites to care.

It's all corny and contrived and usually sensitive. The filmmakers even dare to show the effects of illness--a subject frequently glamorized to the point of being insulting--in a love scene of rare honesty.

The filmmakers uphold an unfortunate tradition in movies based on TV shows by busily adding superfluous plot elements.

The cat is computer-generated, as are his one-liners.

It makes me sick all over again just describing this--the most affecting scene in a sluggish would-be comedy that reflects the dubious state of the art of fat male comedians exploiting themselves in 1997, the year its star died.

It seems almost impossible that someone could vulgarize and coarsen Tom Wolfe's best-selling novel, but leave it to director Brian De Palma, working here with a script by Michael Cristofer, to plumb uncharted depths.

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.

Ice Cube tries his hand at family comedy in this phony story.

Thanks to writer-director Michael Patrick King, I now have a fair idea how it might feel to be stoned to death with scented candles.

Soporific comedy.

When the cast is shown during the final credits repeatedly cracking up in blown takes, one would like to think they were laughing at some of the lines they were expected to deliver.

I didn't buy half of the movie's scattershot gags, but the leads are sharp and the supporting cast sturdy.

When nostalgia, hypocrisy, and indifference to history converge in the kind of shameless Capracorn manufactured here, one can either be stupefied by the filmmakers' cynicism or fall for the package hook, line, and sinker.

Cinematographer Thierry Arbogast is the real superhero; his homage to noir thrillers compensates for the spotty CGI and rescues the movie from sex-kitten kitsch.

Has the spiritual and emotional depth of a Hallmark card.

Directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor were responsible for the delirious "Crank" and "Crank 2" but left the magic behind when they threw together this tedious mash-up of "Tron," "Rollerball," "The Matrix," etc.

Slack direction from Walt Becker (National Lampoon's Van Wilder) sullies this formula comedy, but the cast is agreeable.

An almost comically lurid tale of a little boy abused by his malignant hooker mother, malignant fundamentalist grandfather, and malignant surrogate dads.

In middle age Jackie Chan can't keep coasting on boyish charm, as evidenced by this dreadful family comedy that does him no favors with its opening title sequence.

Director Ronald Neame brings his impersonal British craftsmanship to this 1979 feature, so it isn't a complete bust, but it's a long way from the apocalyptic satisfactions of his Poseidon Adventure.

Another piece of phony uplift from producer Jerry Bruckheimer.

Ryan, barely refining her "When Harry Met Sally" persona, is a dud; Annette Bening, playing the best friend who sells her out to a tabloid, is better in the scenes she doesn't share with her.

This remake takes an alternate tack from the original feature, expanding the story of "The Sitter" to a full 83 minutes, but the result is dull and painfully generic.

The production values are above par, but as in Carpenter's original, seeing ghosts is less scary than imagining them.

I'm a fan of director Bob Odenkirk, but my high hopes for this comedy were dashed by screenwriters Ben Garant, Thomas Lennon, and Michael Patrick Jann, all alumi of "Reno 911"!

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

This limp 1998 comedy tries hard to be both irreverent and ethical by suggesting that deceit motivated by self-interest is OK as long as no one gets hurt.

This dismal comedy joins a growing pile of Murphy disasters.

The tone seesaws between comic wackiness and romantic sincerity, with Paltrow better suited to the latter.

This culinary fantasy is mildly inspired.

The Focker franchise has become such a swell payday (Meet the Parents grossed $166 million; Meet the Fockers, $279 million) that now everyone wants in on the act.

Indescribably awful—a serving up of Beatles tunes by Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees with the ugliest visuals imaginable, directed with more glitz than good sense by Michael Schultz.

Director Philip Kaufman's usual flair for erotic detail largely deserts him here, and this thriller seems most interested in lingering over battered and bloodied male faces.

The slapstick is funnier for the nifty CGI, and the script gets in some sly digs at racist cops and multitasking soccer moms.

Throughout most of her career Diane Keaton has shown sound instincts, so it's a mystery why she failed to sniff this false, brittle comedy out as a waste of her gifts.

The movie does have a certain amount of star power and occasional bursts of inventive mise en scene, which do a good job of diverting us so we don't realize that not much else is going on.

The gratuitous use of the city (New Orleans) during Mardi Gras is the least of this movie's unoriginal sins.