Fright Night glides into its first climax with some funny touches but without building much structure or suspense.

Aside from the showy, overwrought credits sequence, it's silly and self-conscious and still scary as hell.

For every line or gag that works, there are three or four more that seem to belong in a different movie altogether, either a darker one or a breezier one.

Can't make its mind up about what, exactly, it is.

The "black maid" may be a cliché. But when was the last time we saw a story told from her point of view?

I'd say you had to be there, but over the course of Magic Trip we learn that the majority of the people who were there didn't want to be there.

Tainted by a script (by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore) so risibly broad it makes "Wedding Crashers" look like Bergman in the Hamptons.

Too earnest and dour to be a silly bit of summer fun, but it's not exactly scientifically sound, either.

July is more of a presence than an actress, or even a believable persona.

Crazy, Stupid, Love. is, for the most part, an effective love story, but the two figures in thrall to one another aren't the ones you think: The magnetism between the movie's two male stars, Steve Carell and Ryan Gosling, is what really makes the movie tick.

Like the recent "Perrier's Bounty," The Guard feels like it might play better at home than overseas.

As it is, The Devil's Double, a handsome and occasionally dazzling thriller with at least one dynamo performance from its star, is ultimately dominated by its style.

This is a film that transcends "good" or "bad," "like" or "don't like."

The picture's finale isn't as smart as it ought to be. Cornish tries to make a damning social statement, but the only thing you take away from the movie is how cool it is to kick alien ass.

Like the Inuit and their many words for "snow," Jake has a thousand squinty faces and they all mean "Bugger off."

Every actor in Friends with Benefits, including the nearly indestructible Patricia Clarkson and Richard Jenkins, stalls out in the process of pedaling desperately to make this substandard material work.

It looks more like your teenage world than such films generally allow, and it's not pretty. It's beautiful.

Ultimately just another less-accomplished entry in the booming cinema of catharsis, your average gorgeous-teen-astrophysicist-meets-schlubby-bereft-composer-whose-family-she-wiped-out-in-a-drunk-driving-accident-on-the-night-they-discovered-another-planet tale.

Though the picture is lovingly and often quite strikingly shot and styled, there are too many dangling and swiftly clipped threads for the film to amount to more than another tasteful Sunday matinee set against one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century.

In the end, the action sequences are just overblown and dollar-squandering, with no particular payoff in the entertainment department. The supporting actors - particularly Jones, Tucci and Luke - are the thing to watch here; they do all they can to keep the movie's gears running smoothly.

It's an amusing enough story, all right, and it adequately fills up Tabloid's 88 minutes - but a minute longer would have been too much.

The scenes between the young actresses are the film's most compelling: Both first-timers, Manamela and Makanyane are possessed of extraordinary faces and plain attitudes.

To invoke Pauline Kael's review of Diane Kurys's "Entre Nous," it's about two women not having a lesbian affair.

The effect recalls the beguiling lightness of the good old Disney, where clever visual and thematic feats are deftly interwoven and yet tossed off with an insouciance that favors playfulness above all.

The movie's final moments are the equivalent of the half-jubilant, half-mournful thrill you get when you close the cover of a book you've savored.

The story's obvious and various potential is left to stand on its own, and the scares are largely uninspired.

Breillat manages to give us a lush, quiet spectacle with The Sleeping Beauty.

Aside from having murder on their minds, these three are a lot more well-behaved than the "Hangover" guys.