For all her prolificacy, Agatha Christie relied too often on one particular plot twist, and as soon as you recognize her old favorite here, the film loses all interest—it has nothing going for it apart from the mystery, which, of course, is no way to make a mystery movie.

Forgettable coming-of-age story.

This drama about Baltimore firefighters makes a serious effort to honor the sacrifices of professional rescue workers, but blasts of hokum keep threatening to collapse the building.

It doesn't display an ounce of planning or simple craftsmanship (the Jamaican locations are photographed to look like the banks of Lake Calumet), but with a cast like that, it can't help but have its moments.

Assembled by Gene Kelly, it jerks and sputters along through an overedited collection of songs, dances, comedy routines, and dramatic excerpts, with a strong tendency toward camp. Gene should know better.

Maybury's art-world talents don't include storytelling, and his visceral bursts of fast editing and extreme close-ups don't yield any full-blown characters, narrative, or political vision.

The ultimately uncomplicated view of sexual and emotional violence in a family is only tragic, not insightful.

A cute send-up of preadolescent stereotypes.

The exotic plant and animal life is enhanced by the 3D process--which makes the two-dimensional screenplay all the more disappointing. With its weighty dialogue the movie becomes depressing well before the final violent showdown.

It's all so overdetermined -- each encounter of the present-day lovers mirrors some moment from the long-ago day when they parted -- that it reduces their whole affair to a matter of last-minute revisionism.

There's something offensive about the movie's chintzy view of death and the way it periodically flirts with promising conceits (i.e., Goldberg offering her body as a surrogate so that Swayze and Moore can "touch" one another) only to back away from them in as cowardly a manner as possible.

Becomes blandly idealistic.

Dog slobber enthusiasts (as well as fans of dog farts) will have a field day. Everyone else will have to settle for a formulaic cop comedy that has Hanks but little else.

Far less insulting to Pakistanis or Mancunians than it is to its audience.

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

Despite a good deal of witty, bantering dialogue and clever plotting, some interesting moral ambiguity about the relative corruption of a cop (Russell) and a drug dealer (Gibson), and a likable performance by Raul Julia, this film seems overinfected by the kind of southern California narcissism that makes all of the male characters a little too pleased with themselves, with Pfeiffer little more than a beanbag in the little-boy macho games.

Thematically the film starts off like “The Believer,” Henry Bean's 2001 drama about an anti-Semitic Jew, and winds up like “Sullivan's Travels” without the comedy.

Ultimately Barker's style drains the life from the film, making it feel like an academic exercise as it becomes increasingly inert, emotionally and dramatically.

The heroes (Kilmer, Derek Luke) are all totally good, the villains (Ed O'Neill, William H. Macy) are all totally bad, and the macho one-liners are sufficiently adolescent to produce the desired snickers. I tried very hard to imagine I was somewhere else.

Unfortunately this is much tamer than it had to be--Rudnick Lite, meaning on the edge of evaporation.

A flat, stagy, artificially cheerful affair that falls far short of the memorably creepy Laurel and Hardy version of 1934.

Never really generates any serious laughs.

It's hard to enjoy the movie's charms when writer-director Todd Graff (Camp, Bandslam) keeps trying to shove them down your throat.

The direction of this clammy 1935 horror item is credited to Louis Friedlander, which is actually Lew Landers in hiding—perhaps understandably.

Lugubrious and rather contrived... Because this whole project seems detached at times to the point of indifference—no one ever seems to be having any fun, including the filmmakers—even one's clinical interest eventually begins to evaporate.

Dopey, violent horror thriller.

Bay Area filmmaker Jon Moritsugu (Fame Whore, Mod Fuck Explosion) is known for his angry, manic energy, but the characters in this video, denizens of the San Francisco art fringe, seem like they're heavily sedated.

The ideological reasons for the heroine's project aren't divulged, so I guess we're supposed to be fascinated simply by the fanaticism of her will, doubts and all. I wasn't.