Born Romantic feels less like it was born than assembled, in a kooky Britcom factory. It's no "Four Weddings and a Funeral," but it's certainly a happier conception than last month's "Maybe Baby."

Murphy's second outing as the M.D. who talks to the animals is surprisingly engaging.

But it's Lopez's movie, and its limitations are hers: Both actress and movie tackle emotional turmoil with a minimum of insight.

The watchability of Extreme Days can be mostly chalked up to Hannah's playful impulses -- and his cast's infectious camaraderie.

Good old-fashioned romantic entertainment, just restrained enough to skirt schmaltz.

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

Hits the wall and runs off the rails. They should've stuck to shtick.

It's good enough, smart enough, and people will like it. It's also a high-concept cop-out, a convention-strangled genre movie that never zigs when your every instinct is screaming that it's about to zag.

It's Norton's movie, really, and he shines both as cocky Jack and as cerebral-palsied Brian.

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

Billed cleverly as a comedy from the heart that goes for the throat. If only Brooks had had the guts to avoid the schmaltz.

Oh-so-tiresomely familiar.

Affectionately skewers the age of polyester pants.

An amiable but contrived bit of blarney.

A pleasant and surprisingly polished fish-out-of-water comedy.

Just isn't funny enough to sustain the lunacy.

The farce hits the fan, and you just wait for the thing to be over.

Engagingly silly sub-"Moonlighting"-style banter.

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

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

Feels like it was pulled out of the freezer and hastily microwaved about 10 minutes before you arrived at the theater.

A bit too bloodless to howl about.

In its attempts to chart a young girl's journey from innocence to experience, The Invisible Circus ends up having all the heft of a Nancy Drew mystery decked out in a tie-dyed T-shirt and peasant skirt.

Shower isn't a bad movie -- just a baneful sign of things to come.

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.

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

A cute, clichéd, coming-of-age comedy.

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.

Fans starving for some song and dance celluloid may be satiated, but this movie version really shows the material's age.

As a portrait of a man barely qualifying for a cinematic portrait, Benjamin Smoke is a trifle, but when Sillen and Cohen turn their cameras on the weedy, workaday, hellhole America that Benjamin calls home, the movie comes alive.

Covers some bases, but it feels like the Cliffs Notes version of a grander epic.

Considerably less fun than a marathon of Star Search episodes.

It's amiable enough, but the only real opportunity here is to see Walken step out of the shadows.

For many, the enticement of seeing two old pros smartly step through their pressurized pas de deux might be reason enough to buy a ticket.

A seven-course melodrama.

For all its wit and sharp casting, State and Main is way too pleased with itself to be funny or endearing.

A detective story without a solution and a coming-of-ager without discernable characters.

An audacious but underconceived blend of fiction and documentary that questions the idea of race and identity in America.

Aviva Kempner's utterly conventional documentary plays like a lost chapter from Ken Burns' "Baseball."

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.

Feels repetitive and impacted.

There's nothing remotely bizarre about this boy meets girl meets boy tale.

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

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

On the whole, this documentary is best-suited to hardcore fans.

The film has a standard trajectory, but the details are unpredictable: Kitano fluctuates between goofy pratfalls. . . and elliptical pathos.

As classic romantic comedy goes, it ain't no "Tootsie."

Given a decent script, they might make a fun summer movie. Given the script for Shanghai Noon, they've come up with a middling Old West oater that falls flat at least as often as it finds the funny bone.

Only Elaine May shines, in a weird and wonderful turn. Her loopy character has such a struck-by-lightning demeanor that she's always delightfully off in her own comic orbit even in the tritest of scenes.

If you're expecting an experience approximately as dumb, badly acted, and childish as a pro wrestling match, you'll be pleasantly surprised.

Badly photographed, clumsily edited, and lacking any discernable cinematic style.

This avenging cat gets no action whatsoever. Neither does the movie, despite a terrific cast and a heap of street style.

Whenever Voight steps to the forefront, A Dog of Flanders is poochy-keen; alas, the rest of the time it's doggedly dull.

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

It's a lock to pile up the honors during Hollywood's annual awards season next spring (at the Golden Raspberries and the MTV Movie Awards).

Showing the sex seems to be the film's raison d'etre, which gets you only so far.

At best a vaguely Semitic episode of "The Wonder Years."

Likable, but frustratingly lazy, Ghost Dog has coolness running all through it, but little substance.

The movie is as schmaltzy as I'd feared, and yet De Salvo does elicit some nice performances from her ensemble cast.

As fascinating as the case is as history, however, Scottsboro: An American Tragedy is a TV show, not a movie.

Hazards nothing to speak of and asks chiefly to be congratulated for its modesty.

Eventually succumbs to fatal overlength.

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.

As romantic comedies go, this is definitely not one you'd take to the altar, but you might enjoy having a cup of coffee with it.

A sleek rip-off of "The Birds" that is fast, furious, and watchable, but lacking in the two elements most essential to a silly screamfest like this: scares and laughs.

Startlingly shallow even for a summer movie.

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

Shows its roots early on: Mixing the high camp of "Strictly Ballroom" with Monty's gritty milieu, the film comes off as little more than a contrived composite, despite the best efforts of pros Rickman, Richardson, and Griffiths.

All of the filmmaker's fine work and good intentions cannot make this repetitive and finally tiresome saga fly.

Starts as light, fluffy fun but becomes so blithely preposterous that it ceases to exist.

A watchable mediocrity at best.

Until he (Smith) learns the difference between what has meaning and what's meandering, what feels real and what feels contrived, he'd be better off sticking to the funny stuff.

Just another basketcase with a blade.

Despite the film's impressively epic look and an interesting cast of young and old actors, it ringingly sounds the same dour note over and over again.

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.

It plays out like an endless series of scenes we've seen before.

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

No matter how quotable the one-liners, the movie remains a far stretch from truth or insight.

There's no spirit of adventure to separate this one from the pack.

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

To paraphrase the movie's too-knowing tag line: It's not very funny. But when the lights go out -- it's still not very funny.

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.

Only really comes to exuberant life during the musical numbers.

Wholly predictable and implausible plotting, thin characterizations, and stilted dialogue.

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."

A barrage of dangling plot strands, inconsistent characterizations, and suspense-free shootouts.

Despite being full of Oscar-winning talent, this is still just a better-dressed, drawn-out episode of "Touched by an Angel."

Li's light touch and explosive fighting skills deserve a better vehicle than this overcooked pot of New Jack suey.

Never the heart-wrenching emotional experience it seems intended to be.

It's so plot heavy it never finds its nimble comic rhythm.

Just keeps grinding along, pushing its way through a barrage of boom-boom and a sea of tight-lipped clichés.

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.

Predictable, tame dreariness.

Mangold ultimately delivers the same film any number of other Hollywood journeyman could've made from this material, and the results are predictable and stale.

Without full-bodied characters to play, Smith and Damon are left to get by on their native charm -- something both have in considerable quantity, thankfully.

Somehow manages to stay afloat on a sea of pretension, thanks largely to some splashy visuals.

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

A modest project with an agreeably modest point of view, but it cries out for a sharp, believable naturalism Kusama simply doesn't supply.