Easy to take but ultimately rather aimless.

Where "The Full Monty" earned its laughs with rich characterizations and a biting take on economic hardship, Greenfingers is content to trot out predictable stereotypes, adding a romantic subplot as filler.

Uses the seven days of shivah to launch a series of hilariously escalating confrontations, including one in which elderly men nearly come to blows over who's the more genuine Jew.

Fickman mostly soft-pedals the play's homosexual panic, generating a comedy that lacks both the verbal sophistication of its source and the sexual sophistication of its target audience.

Eventually the kids figure out that parents and other authority figures (among them Rebecca De Mornay, Anthony Edwards, Penelope Miller, and Aidan Quinn) don't always have it together. Was this trip necessary?

It's always at least a little disingenuous to attack the medium that's your bread and butter; this media-bashing movie tries to get around the problem by restricting its critique to television, specifically the news.

This isn't a major Dante effort, but his ability to make a good-natured satire that allows an audience to read it several ways at once is as strong as ever, and many of the sidelong genre notations are especially funny.

What has changed, however, is the audience consuming it: back in 1971, the Peckinpah film horrified moviegoers with its bloody climax, whereas today people are so vengeful and sadistic that the remake is just another multiplex crowd pleaser.

Takes a while to arrive at what it has to say, but some of the performances kept me occupied in the meantime.

The musical fantasy scenes in the new Singing Detective are raw and purposely amateurish. Although Gordon sometimes fumbles the tonal shifts of the material, the acting is rock solid.

This mild thriller's consistently dark atmosphere makes the scene-of-the-crime tableaux...transcend exploitation and even suggest a kind of feminist odyssey.

The tone -- a combination of earnestness and gallows humor -- is strangely appropriate.

Oscillating between a furrowed brow and her trademark horsey smile, Roberts battles the repressed harpies on the faculty and strives to shake her students out of their conformist mind-sets. Dispensing with character development, Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal's lifeless script shunts its caricatures from one predictable plot point to the next.

As bad-taste comedies go, this is more clever than gross.

The lovers' seduction in the sand borders on laughable soft porn; later in the film, an act of genital mutilation (part of a prenuptial ritual) injects an unexpected note of terror that reverberates to the end.

In what I saw, Madonna in the title role tries bravely not to buckle under the weight of Stone and Parker's sense of Stalinist monumentality and fails honorably, while the Lloyd Webber music goes on being nonmusical.

Despite the show-offy cast, it took me a while to warm to these people and their self-consciously idyllic settings--as well as to the slick direction of former cinematographer Lajos Koltai--but I was eventually won over.

The bar for historical accuracy in Hollywood biopics hasn't always been this high -- paradoxically, it's been rising even as the public has become more ignorant of history.

Tsai's obvious disgust at the sex is part of what makes the film so unpleasant; he remains a brilliant original, but this is a parody of his gifts.

Tries to be an audacious, irreverent satire about youth culture like "Lord Love a Duck," but most of the laughs get strangled at birth by the uncertainty of Siega's tone.

Thankyoubutnomoreplease.

It isn't good, but it's certainly mythic.

Whether you want to trace this romance back to "La Strada" or Allen's marriage to Soon-Yi Previn is your business, but on-screen it never registers as more than a writer's conceit.

While Hanon's film stints on character development, he convincingly portrays the events that foster redemption and forgiveness, as over time the Waodani shed their culture of violence.

Too archly scripted to appeal to kids and too crudely executed to win over older aficionados. The cheap-looking CGI makes the animals creepy rather than engaging, and a plot thread about a series of thefts does little more than spin the tale to feature length.

Sometimes feels like one of those "disease of the week" TV movies from the 1970s.

Flaky, funny, and sexy.

Material so bereft of plot and insight that all it can provide is actorly turns with no cogent means for tying them together.