An enjoyable female buddy caper -- more "Outrageous Fortune" than "Thelma and Louise."

The only reason to sit through On the Line is for some entertaining, if fleeting, musical moments.

There's really nothing more to this by-the-numbers, ailment-of-the-week fodder dressed up with a classy cast.

This predictable romantic comedy outing has occasional flickers of ingenuity.

This might be as perfect a new-millennium Halloween creepshow as we can expect.

The nerviest, oddest, most outlandish and idiosyncratic American indie debut since "Buffalo 66," Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko defies description.

The rapper-ever-increasingly-turned actor -- is having the time of his life, big pimp styling in a flashy wardrobe as he guts and struts.

A new version of the greatest psychological mystery of all: love.

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

This bed-swapping crime story is ultimately too protracted, but Piñeyro's direction is richly atmospheric, full of noir shadows and strong period detail.

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.

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 Zahn's heartbreaking performance that drives Riding in Cars with Boys.

Like being jacked directly into Linklater's alpha waves, and the experience is bracingly new to movies.

Exhausting and fruitless: Having seen it, you know nothing more about strippers or the stripper mentality than you did going in. What's the point?

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.

Frankly, there wouldn't have been enough shtick here to warrant an SNL skit. And if the material isn't even up to those standards, then who the hell green-lit it as a feature?

High drama this ain't. And yet, anyone looking for a hearty banquet of gymnastic, kung-fu tomfoolery won't walk away hungry.

Amid the chaos of this marvelous, uncategorizable film squirms one of the year's best performances.

It's all well-acted and eerily compelling, but the shocker ending is patently implausible.

I'd write it all off as something that is, after all, intended for young viewers -- but then I'd be insulting their intelligence as cruelly as the movie does.

Ultimately, Grateful Dawg will only be of real interest to musicology students and diehard Deadheads.

Pure, irrational, claustrophobic, gritty, unpretentious.

Mesmerizing entertainment, but it's also a cop-out.

The casting is sublime.

The wrap-up's pretty charming, as are the performances, but the film's too heavy for its soufflé-ready ingredients.

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."

This is nothing more than one more run-of-the-mill, surprise-free, suspense programmer.

Basically one elaborate joke about male modeling and all the vanity, emasculation, and fatuousness that attend it. Fortunately, it's a good joke.

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

A funny, frenetic, and often quite touching microcosm of the Big Apple life itself, essayed by a pitch-perfect cast and boasting authentic urban flavors.

Liam is mostly an emotionally devastating chronicle of the disintegration of a family. The entire cast is superb, but Frears has cast two screen naturals in the lead roles.

Take the G out of Glitter and it's litter.

Once the action starts to kick in, Megiddo morphs, minute by minute and scene by scene, into a Mystery Science Theater smorgasbord.

The politicizing is intense, but the actual game footage is even more engrossing; Carlson uses both digital video and 16mm film to put us squarely in the midst of the gridiron brouhaha.

Psychological thrillers depend on convincing audiences to suspend disbelief, but this one doesn't manage that for a moment.

Not all of the jokes hit, but enough of them do that anyone who's ever filed, collated, or played Mixmaster DJ with the transcribing machine will find cathartic giggles in this breakout debut.

About Lustig's direction. Badly employing all kinds of tricks like alternating film speed, jump cuts, and various color tints, she ultimately overpowers her actors and does in her own film.

The actors playing the team members have stereotypical roles, but these kids have got game.

Quite handsomely produced, and there's a definite swashbuckling verve to it. Most of the characters have been contemporized, but the actors are engaging.

Far from creating a pungent portrait of a society gone mad with blood and greed, Schroeder's movie strives for political points while it's whiffing on simplicities like character, motivation, and believability.

All of the interviewees are compelling, whether proudly showing off bruises and bullet holes from on-the-job scuffles, or voicing their opinions about how the profession has changed.

It is merely another inept teen movie ripping off better horror movies.

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.

All that this really amounts to is a lot of hot-headed, hairy men threatening each other -- whenever they're not dancing on table tops, that is.

The real reason to see it is Brian Cox, best known for being filmdom's other Hannibal Lecter (he played the role in Michael Mann's "Manhunter").

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

It's a shame that Jeepers Creepers cops out -- as American genre movies have been doing for years -- and plays it safe with an F/X-heavy creature that no one would believe in a thousand years.

Hard to watch -- not because of its unflinching realism, but rather for its mawkish reliance on every boy hooker flick from "Midnight Cowboy" to "Johns."

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

Together is unabashedly about people who need people. The film's satiric skewering of '70s liberalism works because it feels emotionally authentic.

So wretched that it practically defies description.

This one's all labor pains, and, in the end, nothing gets delivered.

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

This is nothing more than a bare-assed fart in the face of Smith's fans.

Whenever we're not at the ballpark, the film falls back on teenage relationship clichés. That's most of what's wrong with it, actually.

The bubble-kid moms can whine all they want, but Bubble Boy is a liberated movie --liberated from tastefulness, of course, but also from logic, suffering, consequence, and temperance.

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

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.

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

Should be shot at sunrise. Or strung up by the neck from a tall tree. Or at least run out of town by a big posse.

An outrageously silly movie that makes me laugh.

While both leads are appealing enough, it's the stuff on the sidelines that keeps All Over the Guy entertaining.

Pie 2 has neither undercurrent, and hence what was passably cute the first time seems much more puerile and shrill here.

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.

Its emotional sweep is ultimately undercut by murky characterizations and generic plotting.

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.

Some moviegoers are bound to take issue with the trick, "Sixth Sense"-style ending (or cynically see it coming), but The Others is mostly spooky fun, and a strong calling card for Amenabar.

Goran Visnjic is such a sensitive, non-menacing gentleman that any woman would want him as her own personal blackmailer.

Too poignant and funny to be dismissed.

An early scene inside a theater seems intended to wink at Sin's critics: "Disgusting! Cheap melodrama," a lady sniffs during intermission. It's a neatly reflexive acknowledgement of what we ourselves are watching, but even at that, our filmmaker is praising himself too extravagantly by half.

Oy, it's such a pleasure that you'll be begging for Rush Hour 3.

Families already know exactly what they're in for, and they're likely to leave the multiplex high on the hum of a charming cast, sunny San Francisco locations, and a suitably happy ending.

The most disappointing aspect of Planet of the Apes is that, despite its presentation, the film is so very ordinary, without urgency or revelation.

Makes for compulsive viewing.

For some viewers, this will seem a trial of predictability and unrelenting sweetness; for others, it's more than enough.

The more we realize that we're stuck in the company of a totally relentless loser, the drearier the entire experience becomes.

A mess, bouncing nonsensically from one style of farce to another, leaving large vacuums and dead spots — which may themselves, of course, be deliberate.

Watching this movie go through its simplistic dramatic motions, you begin to understand why some actors stick to summer stock and live Ibsen revivals.

In spirit, 101 Reykjavík is so Almodóvar that it could melt the polar icecap.

Sags, lollygags, and blusters too much to sustain the what-the-hell momentum that Kitano achieves in his best movies.

It's dull, two-dimensional, and totally toothless.

Stomps the summer movie competition with heart and humor.

The results are both savagely funny and poignant for anyone who's ever had a friendship that felt like their only connection to the outside world.

The ending is so absurd, in fact, that it feels like it was improvised by a committee of 6-year-olds. If the raptors truly were intelligent, they'd have eaten the final reel.

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

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.

Oddly, Bully's only moments of power come at the film's end, after the crime takes place.

The result is a feast for the eyes but frequently a famine for the frontal lobes, a movie of towering imagination and middling rewards.

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

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.

If you're looking for refuge from summer movie bombast, it's frequently intoxicating.

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

Just try not to smile while watching Jump Tomorrow.

A matted hairball of a kiddie flick that's alternately maudlin and slapstickishly violent.

Whenever the movie's not in the midst of a cinematic spoof it loses considerable steam.

Glossy, gruesome police drama.

Apart from the historical eminence of the poetry itself, Pandaemonium is about nothing much at all.