One of the problems with Mel Brooks's High Anxiety is that it picks a tricky target: It's a spoof of the work of Alfred Hitchcock, but Hitchcock's films are often funny themselves. And satire works best when its target is self-important.

It's innocent and sometimes kind of charming. The sets are entertaining. There are parallels in appearance and theme to a low-rent "Dark City."

The story is determined to be colorful and melodramatic, like a soap opera where the characters suffer in ways that look intriguing.

Unfortunately, “Y2K” fizzles out somewhere around the halfway point, in part because the characters aren’t fleshed out much beyond familiar tropes, and the screenplay seems not quite finished. It’s as if the filmmakers ran out of fresh ideas at some point but just plowed ahead anyway.

Dead Snow, as you may have gathered, is a comedy, but played absolutely seriously by sincere, earnest young actors.

It looks great. The technical credits are impeccable, and Clooney and Kidman negotiate assorted dangers skillfully. But it's mostly spare parts from other thrillers.

A little more fury might have been a whole lot better.

As a source of information about his life and work, this interview is almost worthless, but as an insight into his style, it is priceless.

Director Wheatley and screenwriter Amy Jump are clearly playing much of as pitch-black satire, but High-Rise keeps hammering home the same points, and not even the wealth of strong performances from Hiddleston, Miller and Irons are enough to salvage the day.

The most interesting part of the film for a non-Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle fan is the production design - the sewers and the city streets above them. Roy Forge Smith is the designer, and seems inspired by a low-rent vision of Batman or maybe Metropolis.

It's a film you enjoy in pieces, but the jigsaw never gets solved.

Perhaps this story would be better told in a limited non-fiction series as well, as Queenpins relies too much on scatological humor, farcical sequences and a not entirely convincing message that these women were feminist, Robin Hood heroes.

Absorbing, if somewhat slow-paced, and has without doubt the most blood-curdling scene of live childbirth in a PG-13 movie.

Beaches begins on a note of impending doom, and that colors everything else with an undertone of bittersweet poignancy and, believe me, there is only so much bittersweet poignancy I can take in any one movie.

It circles the possibility of mental and spiritual infidelity like a cat wondering if a mouse might still be alive. Watching it, I felt it would be fascinating to see a movie that was really, truthfully, fearlessly about this subject.

This is not a film most people will enjoy. Its qualities are apparent only if appreciates cinematic style for itself.

Seen simply as a film, The Motorcycle Diaries is attenuated and tedious. We understand that Ernesto and Alberto are friends, but that's about all we find out about them; they develop none of the complexities of other on-the-road couples, like Thelma and Louise, Bonnie and Clyde or Huck and Jim. There isn't much chemistry.

Muppet Treasure Island, directed by Brian Henson, son of the late Muppet genius, will entertain you more or less in proportion to your affection for the Muppets. If you like them, you'll probably like this.

The movie is put together in a sort of disjointed way; there are too many characters, and some of them disappear for so long, we forget them. But that doesn't matter much; the idea is to string together scenes that entertain, and Cleopatra Jones does that nicely.

It's the kind of movie you can sit back and enjoy, as long as you don't make the mistake of thinking too much.

The problem with a story like this is that it's almost too perfect. It tends to break out of the boundaries of the typical sports movie, and undermine those easy cliches that are so reassuring to sports fans.

After seeing Gere and Roberts play much smarter people (even in romantic comedies), it is painful to see them dumbed down here. The screenplay is so sluggish, they're like Derby winners made to carry extra weight.

I’m all for pushing the limits of taste in the name of edgy laughs and portrayals of teen life that don’t sugarcoat the realities of teen life, but while Incoming easily earns its R rating, it has a bit of foul odor about it and features far too many cheap gross-out gags and the inclusion of some genuinely creepy characters whose actions range from the morally questionable to flat-out criminal.

Teachers has an interesting central idea, about shell-shocked teachers trying to remember their early idealism, but the movie junks it up with so many sitcom compromises that we can never quite believe the serious scenes.

Because it speaks to a terror that lurks deep within our memories, Parents has the potential to be a great horror film. But it never knows quite what to do with its inspiration. Is it a satire, a black comedy, or just plain horror? The right note is never found, and so the movie's scenes coexist uneasily with one another.

Director Todd Phillips has delivered a film so different from the first two, one could even ask if this is even supposed to be a comedy. I'm not saying it's an unfunny comedy wannabe; I'm saying it plays more like a straightforward, real-world thriller with a few laughs than a hard-R slapstick farce.

Never quite attains takeoff velocity.

Never comes alive.