Offers up keys and cakes and plunges its characters down a deep rabbit hole.

Messy, frantic, and repetitive, Everybody Famous! takes on both vapid pop culture and the mindless hoi polloi that consumes it.

Works so hard at being pleasant and ingratiating that it wears out its welcome.

Sentenced its audience to a maudlin death.

Turturro's movie is all surface, all artifice, and little substance. Actors love artifice; the rest of us wait for it to clear so we can find something meatier.

It's a warped kind of romantic comedy in which the whole is substantially less than the sum of the parts.

Makes for compulsive viewing even though its noirish plot doesn't make a lick of sense.

This self-consciously kooky road movie about an unusual trio of bank robbers aims for Hal Ashby misanthropy, but hasn't a single emotionally grounded or plausible moment to justify its purely cinematic eccentricities.

The good news is that they've resurrected a franchise with wonderful potential and may eventually grow bored enough of recapping past triumphs to take it in more daring directions.

But jaw-dropping trailer aside, there isn't much movie here.

Dares to substitute wit and warmth for the standard gay indie tropes in tackling its tale of an unconventional couple.

Strangely, what it most lacks is the genuine tension found in the first "Mission"'s signature set pieces.

The movie is a shambles, a rambling, disjointed love tragedy with a story that amounts to little more than a mess of fade-outs, sloppy montages, and dramatic sketches.

You could do a lot worse than spend two hours in the company of two such talented actresses.

It's a polished, beautifully made movie with a rotten heart.

Nico and Dani merely retells a not uncommon tale without significantly enriching it. It's just too familiar to play as poignantly as it would like to.

The Spy Who Shagged Me is impossible-to-resist summer fun that left me feeling, dare I say, randy for more? Oh, behave.

That's just not enough to recommend it, though it does have one moment of real justice: The person sentenced to jail has truly bad hair.

Never less than riveting.

Hardly a ripping, inspired children's film.

At once arch, derivative, and, in the end, bizarrely lyrical.

A riveting, unsentimental tragedy of unrequited love.

Strictly where the boys are: posing, posturing, and talking engine envy.

An orgy of bad decisions and cheap ideas.

Has one of the most stupendously tasteless premises in cinema history, and much of the time when this movie tries to beckon a smile, the effect is closer to astonished nausea.

Feels repetitive and impacted.

Unsuccessfully attempts to fathom Kaufman's lunatic sensibilities, supplying scant psychological insight into what made the outrageous comic tick.

May not quite be more than the sum of its creepy parts, but as a reality-is-fear launch into workaday darkness, it clearly points toward the horror genre's best destiny.

It's a wonderful reminder of the importance of music in the movies.

Opting for this refried mash over Lee's rentable beauty is like choosing canned beans over an Asian feast.

As though fatalistically compelled, all three leads self-destruct: Li is as flat, colorless, and stiff as a panel of Sheetrock, Karyo plays his every syllable in overdrive, and Fonda seems trapped in the midst of a failed screen test for Pretty Woman II.

Pie has some nice surprises and is enjoyable in a smutty, sitcom way. It offers up the outrageousness of "There's Something About Mary" without wallowing in cruelty.

May not have enough story to sustain its narrative momentum, but Gray just might be our best shot at a new Coppola.

It's not a movie you could call dispassionate, however aimless and unfocused. It's a Molotov cocktail tossed in several directions at once.

The flat, gross-out live-action bits, directed by (surprise!) Peter and Bobby Farrelly, don't jive with the zippy, Tex Avery-style animated segments, directed by former storyboard artists Piet Kroon and Tom Sito.

If you're desperate for a James Bond fix, skip the movie and blow your 007 bucks on a copy of the soundtrack.

Might be structured like a soggy house of cards, but it's shot beautifully and acted expertly.

As amusing and sharply performed as it is, Lisa Picard quickly grows thin and dull. Perhaps it would have been better as a real documentary, with Kirk and DeWolf simply playing their pathetic selves.

Bossa Nova has no beat.

A seven-course melodrama.

It's filled with far too much talk and it never justifies its length, but if you succumb to its old-fashioned Renoir style of storytelling, The Grandfather has its pleasures.

Invoking unpleasant memories of "Caligula" (only without the sex), Titus does no justice to Shakespeare.

Every frame of Scott's film is gorgeously lurid and baroque, but it just hangs there like bad art, even during the gore-spilling, Grand Guignol climax.

Brooks' least satisfying film in quite a while.

The narrative disjointedness is not at all relieved by confusing editing, an uncertain tone, and a dragging pace that makes the film a progressively dreary experience.

The total lack of sexual chemistry between them doesn't help. Frankly, I'd rather see Scott Thomas play a nun than sit through another one of these turgid romancers.

The film is never less than a satisfying mix of compelling entertainment and social critique. The performances are uniformly superb.

Appears to have been written and directed by a grade-school dropout snorting airplane glue.

All this artful violence won't change your life, but Non-Stop is a satisfying quickie.

While An Everlasting Piece is rife with engaging family moments and an undeniable charm, it never allows its characters to find the very thing they're seeking: peace.

Actually lighter, wittier, and more original than it has a right to be.

A thoughtful, stunning piece of work in what, of late, has been an otherwise arid indie landscape.

A ponderous stage adaptation that expends only the mildest effort to overcome its staginess.

Beautifully performed and filmed, but tiresomely schematic episodes like this one cause us to experience major sensory deprivation.

Despite good performances and moments of spectacle, it seems to go on longer than the Cultural Revolution.

If Lee's intention was to cement our loathing of blackface comedy, he's succeeded all too well.

It's a drab, familiar story with no oomph (and less humor than you'd think), and it's inconsistent.

The overlapping dialogue and the comedy of famous people playing self-variations is pure Altman (Leigh, not surprisingly, has worked in three Altman films).

Sunk by its own melodramatic falseness, and it stands as a well-meaning yet lacking tribute to a courageous man.

The script is pure Disney formula. Dinosaur offers next to nothing in the way of variation.

Yields beguiling nectar.

Smith and Fitzgerald are funny, feisty, poignant, and altogether realistic. Will they end up lovers, friends, side-by-side corpses? Their sharp performances make Series 7 as frighteningly addictive as crack, or even "Survivor."

Few other 1999 films are as filthy with tantalizing elements as Agnieszka Holland's The Third Miracle, and of those that come close, none other is as pointless, confused, or unsatisfying.

An aimless, pointless dawdle.

The first 15 minutes of Nowhere to Hide rock, and after that it's got nowhere to hide from its own excesses.

Agnes Browne hums along as a series of pleasant vignettes, only frantically shifting to a single narrative track in its third act for the sake of an unbelievably upbeat ending.

A botched effort. Not necessarily bad, but hardly compelling either.

Though far from a sophomore slump, Snatch, like "Smoking Barrels," is such a grab bag of other influences that it's tough to figure out what, if anything, about Ritchie's style is uniquely his own.

A preachy, monotonous failure hyped as a follow-up to his incendiary 1991 debut, "Boyz N the Hood."

The entire ensemble is first-rate.

It's a larky hoot in its best moments, and it has a refreshingly unforced sense of fun that buoys the scenes that are straight out of Lame Movie Laffs 101.

It's Besson's stunning visual fluency that takes center stage, and in the end, that's not quite enough.

Its characters and plot are almost wholly negligible. It's just a party.

If Parker had aimed more at capturing the author's unique voice, and worried less about getting the details right, his movie might have been extraordinary as well.

Comes off as an exceedingly pleasant, wistful romantic romp.

The movie's most glaring flaw is that the brothers and their screenwriters, Terry Hayes and Rafael Yglesias, don't manage to preserve the secret of the Ripper's identity for nearly as long as they intend to.

Writer-director Harmony Korine seems more interested in churning your stomach than in warming your heart.

Giuseppe Tornatore has long been a master of cheap sentiment ("Cinema Paradiso," " The Legend of 1900"), but his latest film is his most shallow, reprehensible exercise in nostalgia to date.

The year's first sure-fire Oscar nominee has arrived with flying colors.

By the time Rock Star reaches its cop-out, "All About Eve"-ish ending, the only thrashing that should be going on is of the filmmakers, for bungling such a promising premise.

So desperate to be rebellious and cool, that it's impossible to see it as anything more than one big case of "been there, done that" -- even if your drugs have already kicked in.

Dim and eye-rollingly foolish -- Call it Dumb, Dumber, Dumber Still, and Dumbest.

McDonald makes for an appealingly befuddled bloke, and the sprightly Montgomery would turn any blighter's head. In a better movie, we'd care about what happened to them.

A pale imitation of the original Winnie the Pooh Disney shorts of the '60s, but a vast improvement on the current Pooh TV series and straight-to-tape specials.

A gritty, well-acted urban drama with lots of humanity.

Never takes off, and much of the time Pool seems lost herself, resorting to clichés, redundancy, and dead-end allegory.

Marred by an unconvincing love triangle and an insincere dénouement, it's a story that nonetheless resonates as much as "Saving Private Ryan does."

Relevant message aside, there's no good reason to sit through photographer Neal Slavin's directorial debut.

Too much of a locker-room melodrama to make for great tragedy.

Crawford's such a good-hearted guy, you can't help but want a cut from his clippers.

Roos combines a sharp script with excellent performances.

At their trenchant, tuneful best, the Barenaked Ladies take flip comic spins on serious subjects (alcoholism, heartbreak). But offstage, they have nothing of substance to reveal.

The movie's still thinner than a supermodel's waist. It's not just that the results are less than heavenly; it's that we don't know what the hell they are.

For audiences new to this type of moon-mad magical realism and unembarrassed romanticism, Orfeu can spellbind.

Allen's good with the material, but Hunt sparkles, repeatedly razoring her diminutive antagonist to shreds.

Deserves to be applauded for not casting Freddie Prinze Jr., but this sloppy, somnolent, strung-together flick pales when compared to such other teenage riffs on classic literature as "Clueless" and "10 Things I Hate About You."

Impeccably produced.

Tries to have it both ways -- as a kitschy ode to bodybuilding culture and as a tragic story of a man who was persecuted for his dreams.