The film's gadgetry is pricier, but the leering is strictly the Playboy joke page circa 1967.

The fun is in getting there, and in the mechanics, charted by writer-director Francis Veber.

Sander has turned mediocrity into the triumph of the smug.

Of the many excellent animated features Disney has produced over the past decade, this is the one that feels the freest, and sweetest.

It doesn’t add up to much, which is part of the point as well as the fun, but what makes the film noteworthy is its pure pop adrenaline.

Parker has boiled An Ideal Husband into a thuddingly unimaginative costume drama laden with frocks, riding crops, servile butlers and very good actors desperately treading water.

Audaciously conceived, yet at times curiously flat, at others incongruously prosaic in its emotional tone.

A movie that's nearly as good as its publicity campaign.

John Turtletaub directs Gerald DiPego's silly script, pumping it full of sudden shocks and cheap dramatics where there should be steady tension and character development.

Buena Vista avoids literal politics, as if all that is beside this film's point.

The result is two films: a big, dreary star vehicle that sags whenever its leads spend quality time together, and a mettlesome British caper whose nutsosecondary characters walk away with the movie.

Offers no perverse philosophical conundrums and no eye-popping visuals. It's a dull, lifeless bore.

I warn you, I'm gonna continue whining about the movie. Just keep in mind that I liked it.

The set design is gung-ho Hallmark (Tinkerbell lights, that sort of thing) with a strong whiff of Fellini (the fairy glade looks like a pre-Raphaelite red-light district).

This gets my vote as director Franco Zeffirelli’s finest film. Certainly, it’s his most personal.

A near miss overall, but enjoyable in its littler particulars.

Many in the youthful target audience won’t be able to identify the "homages," and the script is far too lazy for seasoned horror fans to stomach.

The only decent actors in Entrapment are high-tech tools of global robbery.

What's left is "Masterpiece Theatre," a very clean, straightforward adaptation of a beautifully constructed play, faithful to a dead man's classical virtues -- harmony, proportion, balance -- if not to the director's own, more iconoclastic ones.

eXistenZ gives us Cronenberg at his wittiest, and Leigh at her most vulnerable and fascinating.

Election is finally, necessarily, as much about sex as it is about politics -- wanting it, getting it, losing it.

Cloying, obnoxious, unfunny, evil, shallow, schadenfreude-wielding, dumb-fuck-fratboy-wants-a-blowjob, sitcom-directed piece of elbow-in-the-rib-till-you-puke-blood, just-connect-the-dots-and-we’ll-all-make-a-lot-of-money-and-nobody-gets-hurt...

Ultimately a wiser and truer film than its crass and cartoony beginnings would have us believe.

Demme (Monument Ave.) brings a sure hand with pace and structure to the soft-at-heart script by Robert Ramsey and Matthew Stone, allowing Murphy, Lawrence and company to sit back and focus on the job at hand -- making us laugh.

As usual, the final fight-scene extravaganza is outstanding, but it’s hardly worth the dreary hour and a half that precedes it.

Entertaining and slight, topical and cannily familiar.

Replete with false dilemmas, assisted by a dreadfully stagy screenplay and directed with all the animation of a tableau vivant, Metroland is such a draggy bore.

Not even Altman's loose-limbed shooting style can redeem Cookie’s Fortune, a bafflingly pointless farce that belongs more properly in the vaudeville halls than on the director's sporadically lustrous résumé.

It goes straight to the top of the class. O can there be such a thing as too keen a guilty pleasure, particularly when the whole genre is knowingly pitched to audiences as a trashophile's delight? No, there cannot.

Bill Pope's swooping, noir-inflected cinematography is wonderfully complemented by Owen Paterson's inventive production design, a great soundtrack and the best fight choreography this side of Hong Kong. And even if this isn't "Blade Runner," it is very cool shit.

Paula Gray wrote the script (it was her UCLA senior thesis), and if there are gooey spots, there's also nicely turned, lived-in dialogue and a gentle affection for all her characters.

Although the hinges connecting the film's elements -- slapstick, political satire, thriller, gross-out shots -- sometimes squeak loudly, they hold the movie together nicely.

The tale has been tidied, buffed, waxed and polished into a harmless but relatively boring adventure.

It’s the sort of performance that announces itself with the subtlety of a lit-up highway construction sign. Caution: Actress at Work.

Roger Nygards’ sweet, gently funny documentary about the wild and woolly fans of all things Star Trek doesn’t really reveal much about the original landmark series and its various spinoffs, nor does it ever really get to the heart of the shows’ enduring appeal.

An excruciating no-brainer blend of “Starship Troopers” and “Top Gun,” without the former’s guilty-pleasure concoction of gory F/X and dark humor or Tom Cruise’s megawatt smile.

There are ticklish moments, but no real laughs.

A truly dreadful sequel.

Watching Ramis struggle with his two stars is like watching someone try to juggle lead weights.

In truth, the only reason this film was made was to allow viewers to ogle pretty young things behaving badly.

The tediously convoluted plot involves the foursome’s attempt to pay him back, a labored venture that involves crooks with names like Dog and Plank, a man on fire, some fine cinematography, plenty of gore though no real point.

This film may never attain a critical mass of satiric understanding about its milieu or time, but at least its individual moments provide plenty of harmless laughter.

Mike Judge’s live-action directorial debut not only whittles the high-strung festering soul of ‘90s Orthodox Corporationism down to the quick and quintessential but wraps its veins around his fingers and flosses our teeth.

It’s like watching an annoying young drag queen who flubs the quips she’s stolen, refuses to shut up and thinks attitude is wit.

A flimsy premise to begin with, it’s been punctured beyond repair by an amateur script from Bill Kelly and director Hugh Wilson (The First Wives Club), and by Wilson’s shocking ineptitude with dialogue, framing and pace.

Even the easily weepy may grow impatient with the snail’s pace of this melancholy romance.

A betrayal of all things Buffy, not to mention a complete waste of Gellar’s strengths as a young actress. Even the most hardcore of her fans would do well to give it a miss.

Helgeland strips the material back to its pulp origins and overlays it with a patina of glib motifs familiar to devotees of Hollywood’s 1970s renaissance.

It’s hard to know what’s more depressing -- a senseless remake or the idea of a once-great director doing such shockingly slack work.

Even when the film does strike some genuinely heart-tugging notes, they’re invariably shattered by such ham-fisted lines as “You really are blind.” At times, it’s enough to make you wish you were deaf.

FX whiz John Bruno (Terminator 2, True Lies) makes a dubious directorial debut here, juggling monsters that are icky but not scary; an out-of-control Donald Sutherland as the tug’s Ahabesque captain.

Malick dangles his maddeningly innocent ideas about life and death and man's gift for self-destruction.

Affliction is a work of realist art rich in quotidian detail, a Grimm fairy tale about a community under siege, and a lament for a good man gone bad for nothing.

This sensitively directed film is one of those rarest of accomplishments: a graceful work of art about the very creation of art itself.

A tight blend of self-awareness, humor and fear.

A well-chewed gumbo of every lawyer flick you’ve ever seen.

Less a movie about stepfamilies than a PSA about how cancer makes everyone behave themselves at Christmas.

Williams is a great clown, and Oedekirk and Shadyac give him room to really cut loose, and cure the movie. That’s as it should be.

Thou shalt not covet any thing that is thy neighbor's. Maybe DreamWorks should stop trying to be Disney.

In one of the sweetest ironies of the entire film year, Sam Raimi has made an A-movie with the soul of a B-movie classic.

Good fun, though not more than up-market situation comedy studded with the usual leaps out of period-speak to swipe at contemporary Hollywood.

A beautifully off-center movie.

With its young-vs.-old plot conflicts, its vid-game-reminiscent setups and its prominent positioning of a 12-year-old in the cast, the ninth Star Trek movie explicitly stalks kids, and probably snares neither them nor their parents.

As mean-spirited toward its working-class characters, especially its women, as it is profoundly unfunny.

Anne Heche is just another neo-noir minx on the make, while Vince Vaughn, grinning and leering as Norman Bates, sinks the movie.

The most pleasure to be had from this high-tech bore is to compare the Disney world-view evidenced here (the triumph of collectivism) with that of DreamWorks’ own creepy-crawler animation, “Antz” (the triumph of individualism).

Pitched as a black comedy, the film thus far seems to have divided audiences between those who think it unaccountably hilarious and those who see it as the latest manifestation of what might be called the new nihilism.

Written by Vince Gilligan and directed by newcomer Dean Parisot, Home Fries is far too cute and eager to please, but Barrymore and Wilson are charming, and O'Hara is a blast.

Writer-director Kirk Jones has the movie roll over, fetch and chase its own tail in order to make you love it.

Celebrity is one of Woody Allen’s finest. This is a minority opinion….But I prefer Allen when he works in a minor key – “Broadway Danny Rose,” “Radio Days” --precisely because he’s not trying to be profound, only true to firsthand observation.

This paranoid thriller has all the failings we expect...but Enemy of the State also has enough wit, talent and narrative thrust to mostly transcend those flaws, at least until that ludicrous finish.

Meet Joe Black is a hefty three hours long, and just so you know, it is at least two before Claire Forlani, as the Parrish daughter, Susan, unbuttons Pitt's shirt.

It's noisy, it's flashy, and it's deadly dull -- without the goofball, horror-nerd energy of Kevin Williamson, who wrote the first film, this essentially storyless picture, written by Trey Callaway and directed by Danny Gan-non, revolves doggedly around Hewitt's tits.

Bollywood meets The Godfather.

The pre-posterous plot is a far-fetched way to dis-cuss the power and meaning of the Consti-tution in the context of international terror-ism.

Writer-director Todd Haynes (Safe, Poison) still makes movies like a first-time filmmaker afraid he won't get another chance; he crams every idea, every image ever dreamed, onscreen.

Of course it's dumb, but every 10 minutes or so, it's also pretty funny.

Curiously, one of the film's stranger effects is that it's more convincing as a meditation on desire and Hollywood than as a biographical exploration.

Director Tony Kaye may be reaching for opera, but screenwriter David McKenna has set his sights distinctly lower.

LaGravenese (writer of "The Fisher King," adapter of "The Bridges of Madison County," making his directorial debut) eschews distractions of style and molds our attention to the performances.

There's a surprising amount to relish about this gleefully self-conscious, disposable romp through horror's sexiest subgenre, mainly the film's grasp of its own terms.

The director gives us not just a pop Holocaust but a prettified, palatable Holocaust.

The results are charming if rarely thrilling, with outstanding performances from Joan Allen and William H. Macy.

Heartless piece of ill will.

There’s something entirely ridiculous about rating a movie like this NC-17: Why should sniggering, infantile, adolescent humor be denied its natural core audience of snigger-ing, infantile adolescents?

There's nothing new about this sado-cinema, and nothing much worthy, either.

Though Beloved sags into repetition after two of its three hours, this beautiful movie is suffused with an intensity that holds our attention for the conclusion.

Dunne is committed, thank good-ness, unapologetic for even the most fluttery sentiment or spookiest chill, enjoying the swellness of the very idea almost as much as any fanciful girl.

What's most disturbing about this ineptly scripted, utterly implausible (and at the same time curiously likable) comedy of sin and redemption in TV's home-shopping universe is how close a committed cast and a talented director (Stephen Herek, late of Mr. Holland's Opus) come to pulling it off, to making us feel good about the 110 minutes or so we've just pissed away.

A charmer, complete with cute critters voiced by the ultrafamous.

That Amy Heckerling produced and, supposedly, had an uncredited hand in scripting this turkey is the saddest thing I've heard all year.

What a letdown that Vincent Ward, who gave us a fabulous gift with Map of the Hu-man Heart, has made this big old tub of schmaltz.

If you get your jollies from watching women being shot, stabbed and humiliated, you’ll love video director David Dobkin’s pointlessly grisly, tediously derivative feature debut.

A film in which the mechanics of the plot are far less interesting, and vital, then the interior landscape of men who exist outside the law.

When will Hollywood learn that a genre trend can last for years if itís nurtured with decent scripts? No time soon, apparently.

It's no doubt rude, and perhaps irrelevant, to point out that John Waters still doesn't know how to make a movie.

The problem with Rush Hour is that the film isn’t a partnership, it’s a Chris Tucker movie with Chan as straight man.