This gets off to a pretty good start, with most of the laughs coming from beefy Kevin Heffernan and nerdy Steve Lemme. But at 111 minutes, the movie is too slackly paced to build up enough momentum; like the characters they play, these guys don't know when to call it a night.

It's mostly fascinating, though the unconverted may be in for a rough two hours.

For me, part of the fun of Snake Eyes is the genuine satisfaction of seeing Brian De Palma finally arriving at his own level.

Despite some sentimentality and occasional directorial missteps, this is a respectable piece of work--evocative, very funny in spots, and obviously keenly felt. With Francis Capra, Taral Hicks, and Katherine Narducci.

Producer Ismail Merchant died in 2005, but Merchant Ivory's stuffy tradition of quality lives on.

The story is mechanical, but Twohy paces it well enough to showcase the spectacular costumes (by Ellen Mirojnick and Michael Dennison) and production design (by Holger Gross).

The film ultimately comes up short when it has to deal with Hickok as something other than a legend; Hill is hampered as usual by his fixation on iconography.

Takes too long to get its themes and characters out on the field.

The results are obviously sincere and relatively serious for De Palma (with a fresh handling of wide-screen composition that plays on some of the moral conflicts and ambiguities), but the entire film is predicated on a fairly unquestioning acceptance of the morality of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam—the issue of whether the highly principled hero enlisted or was drafted isn't even brought up—as well as a refusal to link this war with other U.S. involvements in the third world. So the feeling of helplessness that the film honors and provokes amounts to a moral cop-out rather than a genuine confrontation with what the war meant and continues to mean.

There's wonderful use made of a Maine port town, and Ruben gets a dizzying thrill or two out of overhead shots, but the conceptual overload finally prevents this from coming together.

Madonna, making her directorial debut, aims for the romping irreverence of Richard Lester's 60s comedies, and though she lacks the formal control to pull it off, this is a charming mess.

Throughout the tour O'Brien makes it a point of pride to oblige his fans, though even this comes off as self-centered.

Documentary filmmaker Chuck Workman has a slick and entertaining way of stitching together old footage and practically no analytical or historical insight at all.

The couple's parents have a bit more personality than the other characters, but on the whole this is strictly by the numbers.

The plot is just a delivery system for a series of gruesome, convoluted, and--depending on your tolerance for sadism--hilarious freak accidents.

A major disappointment because here, unlike on "Real Time," Maher aims for laughs instead of insight--and aims low.

As the silver-tongued romantic with the impossible nose load, Martin affects a sincerity that reminds you of Danny Kaye—funny enough, i guess, but I like the smarmy original a good deal more.

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

As the envious, destructive best friends of the central couple, Jim Belushi and (especially) Elizabeth Perkins have the actor's know-how to fill in the gaps, but as the lovers, Rob Lowe and Demi Moore are hopelessly pallid.

Each set piece is effectively executed, but the characters and their motivations become progressively dimmer and more confused.

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

The disconnect between the human actors and the digital backgrounds is more pronounced here than in a futuristic adventure like "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow," and because classic Hollywood cinema is so rich with epic images of antiquity, this can't help but seem chintzy.

The story is often ridiculous, but director Antoine Fuqua provides plenty of fun distractions.

The leads are the whole show, and the understated visuals give them room to make the material their own. But none of the other characters is all that fleshed out (Eddie Marsan, as the woman's cruel husband, hasn't got much to do), and despite having shot the entire film on location, Considine never establishes much sense of place.

Though the action is a bit intense for very young kids, it's probably no worse than what they see on television.

A substantial performance from Clive Owen rescues what might otherwise have been a fairly gooey fatherhood drama.

Few movies on the subject of peer pressure offer so wide a cultural critique, even pointing a finger at underwear billboards, and Bellott's roving eye makes him a filmmaker to watch.

This forceful expose shows how area residents are fighting to keep their beloved Coal Mountain pristine, but filmmaker Bill Haney allots too much screen time to environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and barely any to the urban consumers in distant states whose thirst for cheap electric power is part of the problem.