Most of it is decidedly lame. The actors, however, are ingratiating.

Did nobody involved in this project notice that it was retreading a very deep groove?

Only Kerry Condon, as Freeman's geeky adopted daughter, plays anything approaching a realistic character.

Where are our Tracy/Hepburn screwball combos? Part of the appeal of "Wedding Crashers" was that Isla Fisher truly did have the comedic chops to match Vince Vaughn, and Just Friends suggests that Reynolds and Faris have potential greatness together too. Just not so much in this film.

In the end, the filmmakers strike a bad bargain between action and myth: In their obvious attempt to shoo everyone into the tent--romantic and roughneck alike--they don't serve either end of the spectrum very well.

Despite its formalistic failings and truly absurd Porn Moment, there's a morbidity here that feels quite genuine, and, after the movie is over, it amounts to rough-hewn poetry.

Oddly, the film's strengths -- its quiet, understated manner; its non-plot; the awkward speech patterns and uncomfortable pauses that suggest emotional isolation -- are also its weaknesses.

It's nothing more than a very long movie about someone, literally and metaphorically, having to get back up on a horse.

Isn't great; it doesn't come within a Yukon mile of its TV namesake. But it's agreeably bizarre.

Contact sure is pretentious. It doesn't deliver on the deepthink, and it lacks the charge of good, honest pulp. It's schlock without the schlock.

Kennedy is funny, but too cartoonish to ever identify with -- Diggs and Anderson are the real stars of the show, and need more screen time.

The Broken Lizard types bring the best out of Paxton, only to abandon him in the second half and focus on themselves. A bit more humility might have served them in better stead.

A disappointingly flat, disjointed affair.

Film critics are put in a difficult position when they see a movie that's well-made but features characters so unbelievably odious you wouldn't want to spend two minutes with them in real life.

As good as all the actors are, the scuzzy characters are so one-dimensional that the film falls flat.

Except for a few of his trademark time-sequence zig-zags, Tarantino's storytelling is boringly linear. At a running time of two hours and 35 minutes, it often feels like we're slogging through a B-movie that got too big for its sprockets.

Overly broad and silly at times, the film also has an "important" message to pass along to its young viewers.

Villain? Great. Verdict? Average.

Feels like two films that aren't closely related enough, either tonally or narratively, to warrant their intertwining.

Director Lee Tamahori (Die Another Day) has a shruggingly action-intensive style, which feels at once heavy-handed and lazy.

Starsky & Hutch is less homage to an old cop show than a tribute to the people who made the movie--a circle pat on the back. And no obvious joke goes untouched.

The world of football riots seems rife with potential for the big screen, but Green Street Hooligans only periodically rises to it.

Against all odds, the American Pie movies have actually gotten a little better each time out, though that's certainly not to say that they're, uhhh, "masterpieces."

Essentially this is a pale imitation of "My Life as a Dog" or "Cinema Paradiso." It means well, but it's only a "feel-good" experience if your concept of that term involves being jerked around and doused in sap.

Condensing, paring and shorthanding the story elements can be daunting, and, despite the efforts of Kasdan and Goldman, two masters at wrangling unwieldy source material into shape, there is some awkwardness and confusion in the result.

In The Game, Fincher pulls back from the total gross-out but sustains a tone of aggravated anxiety. Hitchcock could have done this material and still made its perversities pleasurable.

Conversation is as meaningless as anything else in this barbarist take on "The Searchers."

Generally engaging.