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.