These pandas, they're truly wondrous on the big screen, as no digital effect could ever recreate. Director Robert M. Young delivers a spry, richly detailed adventure for general audiences, truly a feat deserving acclaim.

The story's a trifle, but it's consistently edgy as the team stride straight into the middle of grisly violence so they can capture it on film.

Delivers a quick buzz, lots of stuff to look at, and a totally nonnutritious joy that can only be attained with the aid of artificial flavorings and Yellow #5. In a nutshell, it's the perfect summer movie.

The film is often moving and explores the discomfort inherent in the contacts between the American "hosts" and their "guests," but its effect is diluted by slow pacing and lengthiness.

Think "Basic Instinct" with brains, and you've got it.

While the whole is diverting, the ending's utter repudiation of reality seems like pissing on the audience; -- we feel like we've been suckers for bothering to care about the characters at all.

Ultimately, Hart's War can't decide what it is: treatise on racism, escape (and escapist) thriller or murder mystery. So it sits there -- and we sit there with it, waiting and waiting. And waiting.

Isn't quite as offensive as it sounds, nor is it in any way rousing; Spacey and Bridges are watchable, but nothing more.

This tripe, however, isn't worth your time or our ink.

It's a modest family comedy, probably fun for kids and reasonably cute, or at least not too insufferable, for most of the grownups who will take them.

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.