With the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy completed and the next "Chronicles of Narnia" movie two years away, fantasy aficionados needing a Yuletide fix may have to settle for this dull sword-and-sorcery epic.

This comedy-drama was written by Simon Beaufoy, who brought us "The Full Monty," and it has some of the same gamy mix of alternative sexuality and working-class heart.

Watching John Leguizamo labor to keep this leaky vessel afloat, I was reminded of all those Hell's Kitchen melodramas James Cagney rescued in the early 30s.

Watching this quick-buck sequel was about as pleasant as having my wisdom teeth pulled.

This putrid action flick crawls along for two and a half hours before expiring in a septic field of bad one-liners, halfhearted catchphrases, obliterated cars, vicious slow-motion bullet penetration, graphic corpse mutilations played for laughs, and shamefully hollow bonding scenes between its two dyspeptic megastars.

I'm guessing Donald Sutherland agreed to do this tedious horror flick because he heard Sissy Spacek was on board, and Spacek agreed to do it because she heard Sutherland was on board.

The tear-jerking is so determined and persistent that your ducts feel as if they'd been worked over with a catheter. But despite its great length, the film never makes sense of its central relationship, between Jon Voight's washed-up prizefighter and Faye Dunaway's chichi fashion designer.

This is pretty thin soup, but the players are spirited and the jokes generally offbeat.

I haven't seen the original, and this mishmash -- doesn't make me want to.

Bloody gangsta crap.

Perelman never overcomes the disjuncture of having two familiar actresses play the same grown character, and despite the endless crosscutting, the two halves settle respectively into ghoulish foreboding and murky psychological drama.

Half the film passes while Pierson fumbles with the exposition—setting up an intricate internecine war for control of a Gypsy clan—and then he fumbles the action. Pointless, messy, rambling; no atmosphere and no energy.

This is loads of fun in the early stretch, as the characters are being introduced, but the story never really goes anywhere.

Put this one back on the shelf, and walk away.

Horror fans may be disappointed by this handsome exorcism drama, which aspires to the serious religious feeling of William Friedkin's "The Exorcist" but delivers little of its shock or gore.

Wastes most of its 110 minutes making impotent jokes about male sexual behavior and the repugnance of old women.

Suffers from suspense-killing righteousness.

You may find it pleasantly diverting, especially if you like the leads, but mostly it made me want to see "Adam's Rib" again.

The picture flogs a fake dichotomy between career and family for 119 minutes until Hudson digests a feeble moral that Laverne and Shirley would have covered in 25.

In essence this is a celebrity revenge fantasy, something few of us can relate to, but director Paul Abascal has the sense to keep the homilies short and the pacing fast.

January Jones shoulders the thankless part of Cage's often imperiled wife.

It's fun, instructive, and stimulating, but never beautiful. Ultimately it's limited by its compulsion to knock our socks off at every turn and to compare itself with "Alice in Wonderland."

I was bored well before the end, but found the first half hour pretty funny.

Apart from some psychedelic flashback sequences, this 1967 spaghetti western is highly familiar stuff, unlikely to interest anyone beyond fans of the genre.

Williams's overacting, Russell's pinched melancholy, and Highmore's unflagging chirpiness would be trying enough on their own, but the convoluted story, with its pileup of obstacles and coincidences, makes this sophomore effort by director Kirsten Sheridan (Disco Pigs) an exercise in dissonance.

Slow, arty thriller.

Without Diesel's brooding lunkhead presence it's more like "1/2 Fast 1/2 Furious."

It's smart, swanky, and good-looking, but strangely, it's not all that funny.