Succeeds as a guilty pleasure, a monster mash that clobbers the recent lackluster sequels plaguing both legacies. If only that were a higher compliment.

Even if you enjoyed the mean, funny 1995 John Travolta-Elmore Leonard crime comedy "Get Shorty"-and many of us did-this forced sequel isn't likely to help you repeat the experience.

Brewster's Millions is a PG film, and the humor is sanitized. Pryor grins, Candy gurgles and we sit there stone-faced noticing all the holes in the plot. Once Pryor figures out a clever way to spend money by using rare stamps on letters, why doesn't he keep on doing it? Yes, that might make for a short movie, but given the way Brewster's Millions turned out, it would be no great loss. [22 May 1985, p.3]

Gimme Shelter suffers from an acute case of the fakes. The speeches sound like speeches, and not good ones.

The atmosphere in Serenity, by design, imparts a slightly uneasy and hermetic feeling. In Baker Dill, who sounds like a line of gourmet pickles, Knight has the makings of a compellingly messed-up antihero. That’s a start. If movies were all start, then this one might’ve worked.

A facsimile of a masquerade of a gloss on "Charade," and on all the lesser cinematic charades that followed in the wake of director Stanley Donen's 1963 picture.

Packed with gratuitous dumb moments -- which is too bad, given that the premise has promise.

The film is surprisingly easy to sit through, digest and even enjoy. Why? A lot has to do with Hogan's well-documented charisma as a performer.

In her (Audrey Tautou) latest film, a quest for romantic and religious fulfillment called God Is Great, I'm Not, she stretches her range to encompass one more personality trait: annoying.

It's not so important to follow plot twists--I couldn't--but the emotional thrust Kelly and Scott want to drive home is plain: Once Domino is asked to use guns and knives and nunchucks for a purpose outside the law, she's alarmed, appalled, aghast.

What isn't scary--or exciting, amusing or fun--is XXX: State of the Union, a movie so preposterous, cliché-packed and over the top that it makes the original "XXX" seem as good as the original "State of the Union."

In scenes such as hundreds of Natives being slaughtered by U.S. troops behind Gatling guns, we have Tonto and the Lone Ranger acting like a couple of comic-relief ninnies, screwing around aimlessly for laughs on a handcar. It's as if the movie were having a nervous breakdown. At one point the masked man gets his head dragged through horse manure. Watching The Lone Ranger, you know the feeling.

Carell's pal and "Daily Show" colleague Jon Stewart has a cameo as himself, one of a chorus of godless media star non-believers who do not see God's larger plan for Evan. Yes, well. At least "The Daily Show" is funny.

The performances are pretty good--with the exception of the nauseatingly sweet H. Hunter Hall (the son of the director) as Junior and a one-note scowl from rapper The Game, who plays Meat--and the screenplay, by Hall and Darin Scott, has some genuinely funny moments.

Director Burr Steers milks them dry, like an overeager farmer at milking time, which is a paradox since this is the wettest picture of 2010, what with the sea spray and Efron's tear ducts and the general metaphysical mist.

Each time a character gets tossed in the air by some manifestation or another, the effect is cheesy. Still, I've seen worse. For the record, the violence in Annabelle is far less copious and sadistic than the stuff in the Denzel Washington movie everybody's going to.

Half the time I wasn't sure what Lee was going for in terms of tone, or style, or focus. It was a tricky assignment to begin with, because McBride's novel, and his screenplay, is part socio-historical corrective, part magical-realist folklore, part wartime procedural.

Though they're a good pair (Hopkins and Rock), this isn't a very good movie. It's slick but hollow.

I laughed all the way through it.

About as sharp an updated version of the original as is Jennifer Lopez's song of the same name a modern, Latina version of the Beatles classic.

Responsible for this trash is director Fritz Kiersch, and remember that name. Last year Kiersch gave us one of 1984`s worst films, his adaptation of Stephen King`s ''Children of the Corn.'' Now, with Tuff Turf, Kiersch has made the ''worst'' list two years in a row.

The film is half rutting goat, half preacher.

In his thoughtfully paced, well-acted film, Hoge doesn't set out to solve the "why" of Leland's ghastly crime. He's more interested in examining the reason why society needs to create and interpret a reason for horror.

Kathy Baker, as Burden's elegantly sodden mother, shows the only sign of interpretive life in this stiff-jointed enterprise. She has about five minutes on screen; she's lucky that way.

Nonstrously over-whimsical. It's a gigantic, fatuous whoopie-cushion of a movie-big, smiley and flabbergastingly dumb. Watching it, you may get an odd, overwhelmed feeling, as if you were being smothered to death by party balloons. [15 Oct 1993, p.N]

The film is a fancy-pants muddle in terms of technique. And if Bloom doesn't do something about his smirky tendency to troll for audience approval, his career may be severely limited.

This script bumps along, good ideas jostling with weak, derivative ones, and Seftel doesn't seem to know which way he wants to handle the material. Also, with Cusack playing yet another soul-fried wiseacre running on emotional autopilot, the piece doesn't have much of an engine.

Baldwin's Kudrow is a one-dimensional, humorless variation on his corporate tyrant in "Glengarry Glen Ross." When the writers attempt to add color -- like with a female office worker who blathers about caffeine and Bart Simpson -- the results induce cringing. [3 Apr 1998, p.A]