Hovers curiously short of its full potential for mirth and mayhem. Still, the movie is more fair than foul, and it succeeds well enough as a freakish experiment and mockery of all concerned.

Little more than direct-to-vid nonsense offered by Disney at dollars on the penny to parents looking to waste time and money keeping kids occupied away from the TV screen.

It has its moments, but they never add up to a record you'd want to play again and again in its entirety.

Never rises above the level of a 1950s-era adolescent romance novel.

Argento knows how to work her stuff, and the result is by turns saucy and grody, a fat lasagna of yesterday's "extreme" behavior dripping with Euro cheesiness.

Everything leading up to the finale is funny and often heartfelt.

A key problem here is that the film is adapting a short story, and, as such, has to pad it out to feature length -- it still comes in at a scant 82 minutes, about 52 minutes too long.

As it stands, it's cute, occasionally poignant and outrageously implausible.

This is mostly well-constructed fluff, which is all it seems intended to be.

Final is one big hunh? barely worth the effort; just because it doesn't make any sense doesn't mean it's art.

It's as light on its feet as a dead elephant. It's never clever or smart, nor is it terribly thrilling or engaging during its numerous fight sequences.

Wacky chaos ensues, as the film veers toward a subplot about industrial espionage, but director Clare Kilner's debut is never as daft as it should have been.

Don't go to this movie looking to be actually scared, but as a gothic romp it's surprisingly effective.

Morrow the actor tries too -- but he's a stylish director with a steady hand and a shaky eye (the scenes from Lyle's tortured point of view are dazzling, if not a bit unsettling). It'd make one hell of a TV movie.

It's technically a well-made film: Chandrasekhar, who directed, gives it the look of a studio feature on a sizably smaller budget. It's just the script that betrays its cast.

Film falls into the same trap as the book: a moderately interesting setup ultimately undone by an ending that makes the audience feel like fools for investing any sympathy with the characters.

Fortunately for the brothers, when your protagonist is personified as Jack Black, you can get away with a lot.

These wonderfully adept actresses take so much pleasure in playing long-faded Southern belles, in mixing the genteel and the bawdy as they conduct their extended therapy session, that it will be difficult for even the most hardened Yankee curmudgeon to resist them.

The best way to watch it is with a loaded bong, the volume turned down and the Orb cranked up on your stereo.

Doesn't hit a home run on every action sequence -- an early bit set in Colombia is too long and too disjointed -- but there are one or two bits in the movie's latter third that are guaranteed to hook action fans.

It punishes rather than entertains; it condescends, it offends, it loathes its audience.

Hardball is not as bad as it sounds, and at its best it's charming.

While Brother may be the perfect introduction for Kitano newcomers, longtime fans may find it superfluous and even a step down from the likes of Hana-Bi (1997) and Sonatine (1993).

An antiadvertisement for itself.

While the movie tries to make the connection between the rough but sensitive lad we see on screen and the notorious carouser of later years, there's little here to suggest whatever torment led Behan to drunkenness and an absurdly early death at 41.

Neither sensuously sizzling nor daftly off-beat, Better Than Sex occasionally rises to its own modest occasion by gently reversing our expectations.

Schnitzler's film has a great hook, some clever bits and well-drawn, if standard issue, characters, but is still only partly satisfying. The problem may very well be one of cultural translation.

Like its namesake, this Simon Mágus is wise and elemental, sure to leave you pensive afterward.

Any story's a good story if it's told well, and this one is, with chuckles to spare.

It's composed of really long scenes that are mostly dialogue, with transition action imagined or implied only. Couldn't we go outside for at least one scene?

Hallström has leavened the story's bleakness with great warmth, fashioning one of the finest films of the year.

At best, second-rate pulp, hampered by excessive length, a thematically meandering screenplay, and a general lack of excitement.

I liked when they had the paint fights and the pillow fights.

Feels like an in-joke, a party where everyone on the screen's having a better time than anyone in the theater, and they all couldn't care less. And that's just no fun at all.

At its best, Cats & Dogs plays like a live-action Tex Avery cartoon, down to the exploding ACME dog bone; it's slapstick and slapdash, full of silly and violent nonsense worth a chuckle or two as dogs slam into glass doors and cats play dead on suburban streets.

Just barely diverting, even at under 80 minutes -- a TV episode inflated past its natural length.

Maybe Baby is Elton's stab at romantic comedy, and it's a strong feature debut, spiffy, quick-witted and more than a little shocking in its unflinching acknowledgement of English people having sex.

Festival in Cannes is an amused indictment of Jaglom's own profession; he doesn't seem to be making excuses for anybody's compromised (or even downright immoral) behavior here.

At 145 minutes it's a bit of a stretch, but the cinematographer is the great Eric Gautier ("Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train," "Pola X") and the score by Howard Shore is far superior to his Oscar-winning "Lord of the Rings."

While this production from Michael Douglas is being touted as a sexy romantic comedy, it's more precise to think of it as big loud fun for when you're feelin' dumb.

Since we know most of this cast is capable of acting, one must assume they received little instruction. Even if they did, who could blame them for not listening? After all, they are dealing with a script that tries to play scenes featuring drunken ghosts with silly accents for tragedy.

Full of fresh and unexpected observations about the cross-culturally complex lives of second-generation Indians living in the U.S.

What's particularly scary about Hollywood Ending, however, is that its flaws are exactly the sort of problems that often afflict aging directors, flaws that we've never seen in Allen before -- bad comic timing, slack pacing, an unsteady control of tone, a reliance on jokes that have long since become clichés.

The redeeming features of All Over the Guy are the consistently engaging performances and some genuinely funny dialogue.

Ultimately, the film amounts to being lectured to by tech-geeks, if you're up for that sort of thing.

For all its brilliantly brazen sequences and energetic supporting players (as the young lovers' mothers, Brenda Blethyn and Lisa Banes are terrific), Pumpkin's abrupt shifts of mood and needlessly complicated ending(s) render its latter third a bit of a chore.

Proves a lovely, sweet alternative for audiences fed up with the latest hell-on-wheels action thriller or the newest horror film comedy spoof.

Like the recent "Baise-moi," Bully is a whole lot of shock and titillation trying to pretend it's saying something. Unlike the French import, however, there's no awareness of its own absurdity, nor anything for the audience to care about in the slightest.

When Affleck keeps getting work, the terrorists HAVE won. With blank eyes and soft features, he has none of the gravitas of his predecessors, Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford, who saved the world with swagger. Affleck merely looks like a frat boy in over his head, which is perhaps the point.

Leguizamo is all twitches and spasms; there's not a bit of subtlety in his high-wire performance. By the time you get past it, the film bogs down in dime-store potboiling.

Like hundreds of doomed movie protagonists before him, the hero of Life as a House doesn't have long to live. By the second reel, you may find yourself wishing his time on the planet was even shorter.

Which leaves Witherspoon, that delicious pastry, to heave the movie on her small shoulders and carry it home. The load is light -- the movie weighs no more than a glass of flat champagne -- but even she can't withstand the burden.

Crowe renders David's dream (and its accompanying nightmare) so literal we can't help but leave the theater feeling as though we've been lectured to, told how to feel and what to think. And for an audience, that's a bit of a nightmare.

That's all Full Frontal is: a brilliant gag at the expense of those who paid for it and those who pay to see it.

Atkins has trouble keeping the tension high and the jokes rolling. Halfway through he begins tripping over the noir genre's dark rules, and in the end he veers off into a haze of romantic redemption that Billy Wilder and Nicholas Ray would have scoffed at.

If you have any desire to see this movie, you really should go rent "The Longest Yard" instead. It's available on DVD, and the '70s hairdos alone are worth the rental price.

May display an energetic and promising talent, but it is also uncomfortably close to being a 105-minute music video, with all the problems that suggests.

Chuck Russell doesn't make masterpieces -- he makes good B movies ("The Mask," "The Blob"), and The Scorpion King more than ably meets those standards.

Mangold gets stuck in the gooey sweet spots of his tale a little more often than he breaks loose with a bracing jolt of perversity.

It feels like a pilot episode for the most expensive made-for-cable cartoon ever produced, and if you expect quantity (or closure) for your $8 ticket, you may feel shorted. The quality, however, is unlikely to be disputed.

It's war porn, a movie that revels in the carnage.

For better or worse the movie is simply simple -- the project's quality and significance depend upon one's perspective: Is this a daring and impressive homespun yarn or just a very middling stab at soft-core?

As it stands, there's some fine sex onscreen, and some tense arguing, but not a whole lot more.

Obnoxious, transparent cornball comedy.

A film you can dump your kids off at the mall to see in order to get peace and quiet for an hour and a half.

Somewhere between setup and punch line, American Pie 2 starts feeling less like a sequel and more like the second episode of a TV series, a case of fine-tuning after the pilot's been picked up by the network.

Lurie's politics aside, it's astonishing that a man who once reviewed films keeps churning out movies full of cinema's most hollow clichés; indeed, he turns out stuff that's even more disjointed and improbable than the most mediocre fare.

An overlong compendium of Oprah moments meant to move and inspire, even if, by the end, it's too exhausted with itself to offer up a single authentic tear or revelation.

Vera's technical prowess ends up selling his film short; he smoothes over hard truths even as he uncovers them.

Full of fits and starts, it never really gets going, stalling at every turn without even giving us enough of what we paid to see -- Snoop Dogg and gore.

Delivers a thoughtful what-if for the heart as well as the mind.

Doesn't swing, doesn't score, can't make it to first base, never even drags its sorry ass out of the dugout.

It isn't until Joe starts getting confident and cocky that Allen starts to feel a little more natural in the role, and by then the movie's plot has all but evaporated into a series of wispy gags that barely register.

The highpoint of the film, acting-wise, comes from Bernadette Peters.

At its best, Jurassic Park III is eerily similar to some of the more recent dinosaur-themed video games on the market.

It's beautiful and obvious, a dubious combination that may nonetheless ensure its success.

Another disposable kidnapping thriller.

It's all a bit silly and predictable, but maybe that's the point.

Deadly dull thriller.

Nearly every attempt at humor in this witless, completely reprehensible "movie" is mean-spirited and stupidly conceived at the expense of some group that deserves better.

It's inspiring and consistently exciting to the eye, mind and heart, as the plentiful formations -- global, but most of these English -- stimulate the imagination with their incredible beauty and complexity. Marvelous work all round.

The whole thing is best enjoyed while really drunk.

As a gallery of the grotesque, however, the cinematic equivalent of a Joe Coleman painting or Adam Parfrey publication, The Salton Sea is a blast.

All the ladies get repeatedly naked, which, after all, is why you're going to go see it. And there's nothing wrong with that.

There is nothing particularly interesting about either the people or the situations. Barrial might as well have filmed ANY body.

Evolution is merely stale, sterile and, worst of all, safe.

What Ichaso does do is take us on a dizzying, constantly moving ride through an exciting decade in the blossoming of "Nuyorican" culture with its most flamboyant figure as our focus.

Not strong enough to stomach this leather-clad jerk-off session, which Miramax dumped onto Paramount in a rare case of common sense.

While some of Max's pranks are exhilarating and funny -- the movie takes too long setting things up and, once the pranks are over, dawdles to its inevitable conclusion.

Marsh's flat-footed recitation of Believe It or Not crimes grows tedious, and his condescension to present-day citizens of the town (implying they're as grotesque and doomed as ever) rings false.

Fact is, there is nothing feloniously awful about the whole thing, but the laughs are tepid and too infrequent.

Its most redeeming quality is that it's so inoffensive parents can feel OK about taking kids.

For folks who like a genuinely tense suspense film with heavy doses of black humor, however, this ought to do it.

There's nothing particularly wrong with this whole setup; it's just very by-the-numbers.

Those expecting the quick wit and inventiveness of the television series will certainly be disappointed.

The film belongs to Jordan Brower, whose every appearance breaks one's heart, and makes some otherwise familiar material come alive.

A unique and striking film for at least the first two-thirds of its running time, after which it turns, all too sadly, predictable and mundane

You can see all the jokes and heart-tugs coming a mile away. But writer Joseph A. Ciota and director Frank Ciota have a light touch. And they have a real find in their leading man, Eddie Malavarca.