With her bulging blue eyes, elaborately braided hair and slinky spandex costumes, she's an indelible icon of action-heroine chic, and, quite frankly, the films don't deserve her.

If it were less prone to soap-opera histrionics, this screechy saga of an upscale family collapsing under the weight of its members' self-absorption might have something worth saying about domestic politics in post-fascist, post-communist, post-socialist Italy.

So many romantic cliches it's laughable.

What at times feels like a maniacal romp becomes just another sporadically funny, but mostly lame, piece of disposable product.

Although its lushness and penchant for melodrama are the cinematic equivalent of Billy Sherrill's syrupy string arrangements for George Jones, Tammy Wynette and Charlie Rich circa 1973, the movie deftly manages to remain sweet without becoming saccharine.

Plotwise, the movie's groove is more like a well-worn rut. Visually, too, the movie looks half-recycled.

It's a wit-free homage to Hitchcock and M. Night Shyamalan that, for all its slick presentation, never comes close to hitting the mark of its forebears.

Unless your child has a close working knowledge of the role of homing pigeons in World War II British espionage, he or she is likely to be bamboozled for the duration.

Another drearily sadistic and pointless crime thriller.

Yep, it’s Keyser Soze time.

Maher's filmmaking is competent -- the sets are inventive, and all the camera angles match up -- but someone should have warned her that neither she nor her young cast is experienced enough to pull off the line “The only people buying it are the faggots.”

Seems stuck in fad mode, a showcase in search of a movie.

The question for skittish distributors is not whether Looking for Comedy will play in Peshawar, but how long the movie will take to put Peoria to sleep.

A threadbare plot peeks through the shameless run of shopworn jokes about Viagra, stashed-away dildos, eager old dames delivering unsolicited casseroles to freshly widowed men.

The method to the madness of the traps turns out to be quite clever, but the rewriting of Saw mythology is the slasher equivalent of revising Star Wars so that Greedo fires at Han Solo first.

But while some may leave the theater tapping their toes and whistling the lyrics to such inimitable original ballads as "Hard for a Pimp" and "Whoop That Trick," they should hang their heads low and mourn the sorry state of the contemporary African-American movie.

Director Black is competent with the camera, but he seems to have instructed the entire cast to deliver their lines in hushed tones and pauses pregnant with hoped-for meaning -- except for Kwanten, whose overenthusiastic impersonation of a red-state rube is as grating as horseshoes on a blackboard.

The film is distancing and off-putting, more a feat of look-at-me-ma derring-do than something resonant, meaningful and just the slightest bit moving.

Although (Reeves) acting inclines toward the wooden, it's always been his weird genius (if that's the term) to exude a charmed aura, an uncanny sense of being the chosen one -- remember, he's been the Buddha. I'm not sure any other actor could play Neo nearly so well, for the others would all be working to seem like The One (as he's known), while Reeves conveys that quality just by showing up.

Life goes far past the boiling point for most of the characters in this hilariously overwrought ghetto soap opera from cult writer-director Buddy Giovinazzo.

Screenwriter John Pogue and director Rob Cohen expose only the dullness of their own imaginations.

All the fine cinematography -- lots of beating wings and impossibly large dust motes floating through slanting beams of sunlight -- can't hide the sad fact that the second half of the film delivers none of the shocks and starts required of atmospheric horror.

Assante, restrained and thoughtful, reveals Vinnie's midlife bewilderment as much as his bred-in machismo. His performance is too delicate, though, to stand up to the rigidly formulaic schemes

This look at the assorted struggles of modern hetero coupledom gives off a distinctly moldy aroma.

This perfectly distracting, ultimately unsatisfying film feels like a James Bond flick in which the stand-in got the lead.

It’s amusing, but it also eventually becomes tedious, like a comedy sketch that milks a good joke just a little too long.

Despite the claw-baring premise, this comes off as a tame, lame female cousin of "Barbershop," due to a maddening absence of storytelling momentum, editing continuity, fresh humor and even a modicum of detail about such a rich cultural topic as urban hair trends.

A taut mess -- beautiful, gory, tedious and puzzling.