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

If not all the gags work, the overall irreverence and all-American anomie are fairly contagious.

Zemeckis captures all the story’s terror, but its pathos has always been the real challenge, and it mostly eludes him.

Chris Klein steals the film as a rival ex-nerd, now the most gorgeous guy in town, while director Roger Kumble (Cruel Intentions) cribs from the Farrelly brothers and the Three Stooges.

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.

The earnestness of some of the drama in the only deceptively unsophisticated narrative may be more shocking than any of the gross-outs.

Bong's opening and climactic scenes, in which the old woman bops around to a dance tune amid a vast field of yellow grass, are typical of the movie's cockeyed poetry.

For much of its length, the film is a surprisingly serious plea for the rights of the mentally ill and the legitimacy of the insanity defense. When the need to make a commercial shocker finally asserts itself, the film shifts gears with unseemly, damaging haste. Though far from a worthy successor to the original the film clearly could have been much worse.

One can certainly be amused and entertained by writer-director Michael Davis's hyperbolic action frolics--I was--but not without feeling pretty low and stupid.

I've heard it said that Philip Seymour Hoffman, one of the most talented character actors currently working, can't carry a film himself, and unfortunately this indie feature isn't meaty enough to prove otherwise.

So lackluster both as an homage and as a story in its own right that I was already forgetting it before it was over.

As werewolf Jake, Taylor Lautner does his best to salvage things by showing his bare chest through almost the entire movie, and the rest of the cast struggles gamely, but the script sucks the life out of them. This is definitely the worst installment of the franchise to date.

Less magic also means less fun and discovery, as Harry battles depression and a hostile press; this is the bleakest Potter installment to date, and under David Yates's choppy direction, Maggie Smith, Emma Thompson, Brendan Gleeson, and David Thewlis have little more than walk-ons.

In these dusty American settings, the wistful melancholy of Wong's earlier movies seems fairly contrived.

The only other adaptations I've seen of the Alexandre Dumas novel (which I haven't read) are the Classics Illustrated comic book and the 1939 James Whale potboiler, both of which I prefer to this vulgar and overwrought 1998 free-for-all, which makes you wait interminably for the story's central narrative premise.

Poor distribution doomed the original movie, though Romero has stuck around long enough to serve as executive producer of this respectable update by Breck Eisner.

They've hit a fatal snag. The feature they selected happens to be a pretty good one -- certainly much better than Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie by just about any criterion one could think of.

The whole thing feels throwaway, but some of the gags are funny.

The weaknesses of the film are twofold: an inability to convey any convincing grasp of the present beyond the family's present (and ongoing) situation, and a belt-and-suspenders heavyhandedness that has always been Lumet's biggest stumbling block in driving home a dramatic climax.

The movie's studied tranquillity will appeal to some, though its embrace of traditional village life struck me as self-satisfied to the point of smugness.

Christophe Honoré collaborated with Anne-Sophie Birot on the script of her excellent "Girls Can't Swim," but left to his own devices, he seems like a relatively dull cousin of Arnaud Desplechin (My Sex Life . . . or How I Got Into an Argument).

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.

Director Chad Friedrichs works around Jandek's never having revealed his identity by interpolating shots of the PO box and rocks on the beach with the talking heads of fans, critics, and journalists, and lots of Jandek's wistful, haunting music.

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.

Pretty funny caper comedy.

As a romantic comedy this is a cut above the norm, satirical in its treatment of both spiritually bereft New Yorkers and materialistic Indian immigrants.

Demands that we see as coincidental if not ironic the ease with which Fraser cuts a rug at a swing club when he's hopelessly naive about everything else that's being revived in the 90s when he emerges.

Tasteful, unremarkable art-house fare, rescued from complete irrelevance by Stephen Dillane's bottled-up performance as a writer scarred by the Holocaust.