De Niro gives a crafty performance, and director John Polson (Swimfan) maintains a pleasantly low-key suspense. But the ending is a disappointment.

Translating Woolrich's pulpy obsessiveness and crazy contrivances into the stuff of light comedy is no easy matter, and the movie gets as far as it does mainly with the help of Lake and Shirley MacLaine.

I found it more pleasurable as a time waster than either "Mission: Impossible."

This realist fairy tale of impossible love has a fair amount of nuance and charm.

Director Bruce Beresford -- not intending to be funny but succeeding wildly.

So clinically detached it borders on absurd.

If you haven't lived until you've seen Laurence Fishburne and Sam Neill duke it out in a vat full of red paint, here's your chance; personally, my idea of hell would be having to see this stinker again.

Director Vicky Jenson has a sitcom script on her hands and proceeds accordingly.

The road of excess leads to the palace of boredom in this overblown monster epic.

The screenplay for this 1985 feature is so riddled with character inconsistencies and unmotivated behavior that it plays like science fiction: the unsuspected presence of body-snatching aliens is the only conceivable explanation for the bizarre twists of psychology the film proposes.

Its ponderous explanations about why there are vampires in Arizona in the new millennium (blah, blah, blah).

Underneath the wrapping lies a squalid Tarantino-style crime flick.

This story line turns out to be a put-on, and the latter half of the movie is a tedious mockumentary exercise.

The main pleasure of this high-stakes-poker drama is watching a septuagenarian Burt Reynolds effortlessly revive his 70s screen persona as a strutting paragon of male shrewdness and sexuality.

For most of the running time I was mainly confused, as well as mildly nauseated by the gross-out details of a tale that tends to be more slimy than scary.

It's a great-looking film, filled with wildly imaginative sets and costumes that would have done the Maestro proud, and veteran director Richard Fleischer (The Vikings) rises to the occasion with some sharply staged action scenes. With Nielsen's minimal English rubbing up against the fractured locutions of costar Arnold Schwarzenegger, the dialogue passages don't exactly play like Noel Coward, but this is a movie that succeeds rousingly well on its own humble, Saturday-night terms.

Sappy.

With minimalist and universal fantasies as their points of departure, the superheroic deeds evolve only incrementally beyond the realistic -- a deeply satisfying process.

In 20 Dates Myles Berkowitz strings together one embarrassing moment after another and triumphs in a culture characterized by actorly artifice.

Using blasts of shrill, high-decibel noise in place of actual scares has become a common horror-movie tactic, the cinematic equivalent of botox, silicone, and penile-enhancement surgery. Producer Michael Bay and director Samuel Bayer deploy the tactic so regularly in this remake of Wes Craven's 1984 classic that after a while I just plugged my ears.

The elaborate climax set in a Paris bakery is the least boring part of this trained-animal movie.

It's amiable and smartly paced, if noticeably lacking in conviction.

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.

Has some of the ring of truth, even though the movie lingers far too long over its own epiphanies.

Grating romantic comedy.

Director Alexandre Aja (Haute Tension, The Hills Have Eyes) keeps the suspense tight for most of the movie, only to fritter it away in an overblown ending.

This comedy is a bilge pump of tacky jokes, fake sentiment, and hollow performances, accompanied on the soundtrack by lite rock and hokey music cues. It should never have been made, though it's probably guaranteed a long life at bad-film festivals.

In the finest tradition of adolescent identification figures, he's not only ruthless, dispatching numerous baddies with hair-trigger shots to the head, but profoundly desexualized, brushing off the insistent come-ons of a slinky prostitute (Olga Kurylenko) he's taken under his wing.