Myers pumps out a river of inventive shtick, but it doesn't cohere or connect; he seems less a character than a comedian doing couch time on a late-night talk show.

The actors make this fun if you can overlook the ludicrous view of Jeremy Leven's screenplay.

The plot keeps switching tracks.

Cutesy and unconvincing parable.

Unfunny and instantly forgettable comedy.

Likable as she is, Latifah can't overcome a tortured mistaken-identity plot, buffoonery on the ski slopes, and enough saccharine dialogue to induce shock.

Not even supercool Robert De Niro can enliven this boring tale about a team of mercenary operatives.

It’s amazingly dull, even with William Powell in the lead and guest appearances by the likes of Ray Bolger and Fanny Brice, so of course it won the Best Picture Oscar for 1936.

The TV show was mildly subversive, with humor that children and adults could enjoy on different levels, but the movie strives for a blander, family-oriented middle ground.

Reasonably entertaining spy-versus-spy shenanigans were for me partially undercut by the hypocritical pretense that the CIA and its various forms of mischief were somehow being ridiculed.

I wasn't exactly engaged, but this time boredom never took over.

Told from too many perspectives, the narrative puts suspense above substance, and its social consciousness seems contrived.

Writer Philip Stark ("That '70s Show") and director Danny Leiner ("Freaks and Geeks") apply mature comic instincts to an adolescent genre.

Stupid, vicious, and pretentious, though you may find it worth checking out if you want to experiment with your own nervous system.

Of course the movie's real raison d'etre is watching Ice Cube tear up government facilities and blockades with a tank, spout Schwarzenegger-style kiss-off lines, and commandeer the kind of babes and high-tech cars that James Bond usually plays with.

A chaotic sequence midway through shows Mormon and gay-rights protesters shouting abuse at each other in San Francisco, and that's pretty much what the whole movie feels like.

The best short on this program of five is Bradley Rust Gray's 18-minute "Hitch."

Shamelessly derivative and politically expedient.

Well-meaning rot from 1963.

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.

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.

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."

Frank Whaley and Philip Seymour Hoffman play minor characters so annoying they might as well wear T-shirts reading "Eat My Brain."

A curiously sour movie in its amused contempt for this fatuous family laced with affectionate nostalgia for its unshakable slickness and insularity, but also an undeniably strange one in its adoption of TV formats and cliches, as if these were the only indexes of contemporary reality that we have left.

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

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

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

Its resolution reeks of phoniness and self-congratulation, even if some of the narrative strands leading up to it are fairly absorbing.