Flimsy transformation comedy.

Soggy and predictable screenplay.

Much more deserving of plaudits is the secondary cast--Hope Davis as Schmidt's resentful daughter, Dermot Mulroney as the waterbed salesman she's engaged to, and, above all, Kathy Bates in a hilarious turn as the latter's New Age mother.

Exuberant music and precision choreography furnish the thrills in this thoroughly enjoyable saga.

The film's a swell way of torturing yourself for 108 minutes.

Reasonably entertaining if utterly familiar entry in the long-running SF franchise.

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.

This tepid sequel to Harold Ramis's mobster-on-the-couch comedy "Analyze This" (1999) is partially redeemed by Robert De Niro's handful of scenes with Cathy Moriarty-Gentile, who made her screen debut as the teenage wife in "Raging Bull."

This is like a Ferris wheel--the ride's enjoyable but you've gone nowhere once it's over.

This operates at the intellectual level of the old "Star Trek" in its limp last season, and the professed humanism is belied by the extreme violence and Nazi-chic production design (not to mention a voice-over that traces the outlawing of emotion to "the revolutionary precept of the hate crime").

The problem with these feats is that they threaten to overwhelm the film's content, both as complex historical commentary and as aesthetic and theoretical gesture.

The story is so black-and-white that one feels like hissing the villain (Kenneth Branagh) and cheering the heroines at every stage, but it's so amazing that the simplicity of the telling seems warranted.

Even the action sequences are poorly executed, with lots of choppy editing meant to conceal the fakery.

A holiday film for the whole family, provided the whole family is obsessed with human waste.

Missing is most of Tarkovsky's contemplative and mystical poetry (which is why it's 90 minutes shorter), and added are some unfortunate Hollywood-style designer flashbacks -- The story is still strong and haunting, but I'd recommend seeing this, if at all, only after the Tarkovsky.

The grad student and her boyfriend (Marc Blucas) are blandly written and the story never develops any psychological depth; the paranormal explanation for what's going on is equally slight.

The film wobbles between impulses to be a simple feel-good story and a trickier, ultimately sadder tale about a man facing a moral and spiritual crisis.

Maybe I've seen too many James Bond movies by now, or maybe the trouble with this 20th installment is that the filmmakers are trying too hard to top the excesses of the predecessors.

"Friday" had moments of stoned charm and telling neighborhood detail; this second sequel never gets beyond the angry, cruel, and misogynist.

Reminded me most of Jean Genet's "Un chant d'amour," with bondage and latex replacing incarceration and cigarettes. This is not to say that it's equally good or poetic, but the eroticizing of a whole universe is no less apparent.

The key scene -- is typical of the film's fanciful narrative approach but also its grating pretentiousness.

Caine has already been cited as a likely Oscar nominee for his performance, which is clearly one of the most nuanced to date from this first-rate actor, and Fraser is funny and effective as a foil to the old pro.

Rebecca Miller's second feature shows her to be a careful but somewhat schematic scenarist; her shaky directorial skills are partly offset by her skill at eliciting convincing portrayals from actors.

In this uproarious and often scathing debut feature, writer-director Frank Novak charts the dissolution of a working-class marriage.

Columbus beautifully realizes many of Rowling's fantastic conceits -- but for the last hour I was searching for a spell to make the credits appear.

A gripping and carefully calibrated suspense story.

The plot of the picture is familiar, but it's realized with such delicacy and affection for the characters that it seems as fresh and warm as its verdant setting.

Erkel's folk-flavored music sounds a lot like middle-period Verdi, but many of the melodies are ravishing.