Evening is a case study in how a subtly evocative book can elude the most well-intentioned filmmakers and some of our finest actors.

I'd like to believe I could watch ­Cedric the Entertainer all day long. The tedious comedy Johnson Family Vacation puts a strain on that theory.

The film is admirably honest about death, so it may be helpful if you're looking for a way to talk to kids about a difficult subject. Otherwise, stand aside and let it pass.

It's so cheerfully cheesy, you can't help but be amused.

Has many of the qualities that made the actor such a great target for self-parody in Spike Jonze's "Being John Malkovich" - it's sober, deliberate, self-consciously mysterious and no fun at all.

Good as she is, the effortlessly magnetic Hayek just can't sell the role of a pathetic soul whose deep insecurities turn her into a sociopath. And if she has too much charisma, Leto, as the smooth Lothario, simply doesn't have enough.

It's not just the sexist humor that makes this tired businessman's fantasy so offensive. The real shocker is that the basic plot has been shamelessly lifted by screenwriters Charlie Peters and Larry Gelbart from "One Wild Moment," an equally skimpy French comedy by Claude Berri about two middle-aged pals who get into the exact same predicament in the South of France with their two nubile daughters. [17 Feb 1984, p.5]

Without Crowe and Paul Giamatti, this movie would have little in its corner.

With its halfhearted script, stiff performances and overlong running time, this is the kind of movie that's simultaneously dazzling to look at, and increasingly tough to sit through.

The slapstick is broad to the point of overkill.

The already minimalist filmmaker has gone positively threadbare with Ten, a movie that feels as if there was no director on the set. For the most part, there wasn't.

Feels a little too much like a film-school project, but it does offer an informative look at a timely issue.

The makers of Seducing Doctor Lewis have a cute idea, but they milk it for all they can, sometimes to the point of embarrassment.

Essentially conversations, confrontations, and an extremely pat -- and very verbal -- reconciliation.

Fashion is something you either get or you don't, and whether you'll want to lay down $10 for Douglas Keeve's insider documentary depends entirely on whether you'd spend your last few bucks on the new issue of Vogue.

Zombie's sense of fun gets buried under the growing pile of bodies, and eventually, we're left with little more than a frenzy of sadism.

Unfortunately, Wendeers frustrated wake-up call quickly buckles under the heavy burden of its earnest message.

Even lousy adaptations have worth, if they attract attention to little-seen originals.

A good-natured, gleefully juvenile comedy in the tradition of such classic snowbound fare as 1984's "Hot Dog: The Movie."

A good-ol'-boy civics lesson that's too scattered to achieve its predictable goals.

The movie delivers the promised ballroom action, but not the charm. And if you think the title is endless, wait till you see Goodman's death scene.

Offering both too little material and too much, the movie leaves us in the bizarre position of understanding its subject no better by the end than we did at the beginning.

Sitting through the film is punishing work. The jittery closeups create a response that is more physical (I'm thinking nausea) than emotional, and there are no respites.

In trying to disguise his themes within the structure of a noir thriller, Parker was simply more successful at fooling himself than us.

Despite all the bike chases and bullet-dodging, the real sport here is Xtreme posing.

When the producers of Eros, a triptych of short stories about eroticism and desire, described what they wanted from Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai, American Steven Soderbergh and Italian master Michelangelo Antonioni, they must have written the memo in Chinese. Only Wong attempted something sensual.

The movie turns into something strange and annoying, an attempted blend of a suburban thriller with an Old West shoot-'em-up.

Dunst makes Davies the most confident and interesting person aboard the Oneida and makes this voyage almost, but not quite, worth taking.

It's easy to see the potential in Lottery Ticket, which boasts an entertaining idea and a game cast. But you only win big if every number hits.

Veering between black comedy and intense psychological drama, David Moreton's bizarre thriller never manages to get its bearings.

There is one good, legitimate scare in Robert Zemeckis' quasi-ghost thriller What Lies Beneath, and that's just not enough for a movie that lasts more than two hours.

Bonneville does provide at least one important service: The next time an older actress complains that there are no good projects for women of a certain age, she'll be able to hold this clunker up as Exhibit A.

Looks great but tells us little about the subjects.

It's never a good thing to notice that the actors in a movie are having a better time than you are. It's so unfair. They're paid to work, you're paying for fun.

Dylan's stoner comedy barely manages to string together a story, but lucky for him, his two stars radiate charisma even when they're hidden behind clouds of smoke.

When improv is done well, it sheds a unique light on the human condition. When it is done adequately, as it is in Full Frontal, it simply makes you long for a good script and pricey production values.

Directed with his usual flair for the obvious by Dennis Dugan ("The Benchwarmers), "Chuck and Larry" has the nowness factor of a Polish joke. Does anybody laugh at this stuff anymore?

The movie has a terrible premise compounded by a lame script and the miscasting of its surfeit of talented stars. You have to wonder why Dobkin, whose last film was the hilariously raunchy "Wedding Crashers," would be attracted to this tame material.

An excellent actor too often stuck in unworthy roles, Nick Stahl deserves much better than Andrew Jenkins' derivative, self-conscious heist flick.

Unforgettable isn't.

The script is so ridiculous that nothing rings true.

A pretty run-of-the-mill B suspense movie.

You know that deflated feeling you get after you've spent a lot of time and money shopping - and have little to show for your efforts? This disappointing biography, about performance artist Reverend Billy, does an awfully good job recreating it.

Nolot elicits the last response expected from a movie that's almost entirely about sex: a yawn.

Perhaps less-sophisticated preteens won't notice the amateurish acting, clunky direction and heavy-handed tenor of the lessons.

Finally, you get down to the music, which is easy to take for the first hour, before it starts doubling and tripling back on itself, in an unnerving and seemingly unending spiral of repetition.

Originally intended as a comedy, the snippets of lightheartedness that remain seem awkwardly out of step with the unsurprising drama that replaced it.

With its scenes of full-frontal nudity and its references to the Tiananmen Square protests, Lan Yu may be a breakthrough film for China, but it's well-trod territory for American viewers.

A modern-day fable about love and commitment — it's different.

Most of the resulting film is downright bizarre. Which, as it turns out, is not entirely to its disadvantage.

It won't change anyone's world, but it'll keep kids happy - and cool - for a couple of hours.

As documentaries go, Watermarks is nothing special. But the women who inhabit it are sensational.

Gerry isn't much of anything, and doesn't claim to be. It's a movie stripped of its movieness.

Satire goes 'south' in gross mismatch of hot comic duo and "Airplane" director. [31 July 1998, p. 46]

Free Fire is more of an exercise in how to stretch-out a single scene than a typical movie.

Taking one's pound of flesh and having it, too, leads to a queasy comedy in which Pacino burns a hole in the screen while the frivolity around him sputters.

The themes are about the power and consequences of sex, but the stories are too glib and episodic to leave any impression.

Despite its rare look at the tensions between religious and secular soldiers in a settlement on the occupied West Bank, it's a pretty static, by-the-book drama that would be insufferable without the sullen heat of Tinkerbell and Avni.

The game itself is meaningless, and the movie, much the same way, likes it like that.

After the first 1,000 or so beheadings, impalements and severed limbs, Pathfinder's slash may just induce sleep.

Like a lost recording by the Beatles, Sylvester Stallone's Rambo arrives with its feet planted firmly in the past, a reminder of a time when Stallone, Chuck Norris and other wooden soldiers of the big screen filled multiplexes with the floor-shaking thunder of trivialized war.

This rather limp Australian comedy shares "Bridget's" theme, but none of its panache.

This is a movie full of tin-eared humor and situations too contrived to give romance a toehold.

The movie includes a postscript about her (McKinney's) loss, blaming it on more dirty tricks. That may be true, but it doesn't put the steam back in the film.

With an appealing lead in Cameron, and a nicely brisk pace, there's a decent, midlevel Apocalypse movie here. But be aware that you will have to peel away several pages of the Bible to get to it.

Kingsley seems determined to rescue this old chestnut of a character from Jewish stereotypes, but to what end? Oliver's boyhood has become worse than Dickensian - it's bland.

Leaves the viewer exhausted, jet-lagged from the effort of investing equally in competing story lines.

What holds the movie together -- albeit tenuously -- is the surprisingly sweet-natured pairing of Jesse and Chester.

Amusing as it is, it never feels real.

Beautifully shot but overly spare documentary.

This spirited documentary shows us the hazards of filming volleyball at nudist camps and the marketing possibilities of women mating with gorillas.

Low-budget, grubby and gleeful, but with a nice sense of style and apparently an endless supply of dry ice. Points deducted, though, for a too-easy alien-corpse joke.

If you're just hoping for a little easy escapism, bring your tissues and leave your high standards at home.

The cat-and-mouse game between the patient and doctor and the coy is-he-or-isn't-he? game being played on us by the filmmakers becomes tiring.

An unerring sign of the awfulness of Malibu's Most Wanted is a series of the least funny outtakes ever appended to a movie's closing credits.

But while this terrific cast gets to strut and preen, it's difficult to make an emotional connection with most of them.

Doomsday views are a knockout, but the script is a real disaster.

Approaching the Unknown would be more of a solid premise if it were not touching down so close to last year's "The Martian," with its similar themes, bigger effects budget and superior script.

Krause is very nearly too passive. Deadpan is one thing, an empty vessel is another.

Something of a mess.

Awkward, unconvincing bisexual roundelay.

Big, bloated and only intermittently amusing.

A deliberately stupid movie whose crazy charm wins you over in the end.

But the regularly overlooked Stahl burrows honestly into this unpleasant place, adding another worthy portrait to his indie gallery of interesting losers. He's still an actor worth keeping your eyes on. Assuming you can keep them open.

A safely sanitized comedy with an important message about loyalty and individuality, plays to Lohan's strengths and gives the target audience a chance to live it up vicariously.

Lightweight, inoffensive fare, as bland as a sleepwalker under a hypnotist's spell.

Though all the elements are in place, there's not much magic to be found in Death Defying Acts, an intermittently entertaining but surprisingly modest romance from Gillian Armstrong.

Nicolas Cage does such a persuasive job of portraying Chicago TV weatherman Dave Spritz as a train wreck of a guy that you wonder whether this might actually be a training film for a psychoanalytic convention on hopeless cases.

Ryan’s debut as a director is a sketchy and starchy film. The memorable thing about the movie is that Hanks, still one of the biggest stars on the planet, stepped up for his “Sleepless in Seattle” and “You’ve Got Mail” partner.

Failures on the scale of writer-director Steven Zaillian's All the King's Men are as rare as falling sequoias, and they make a noise even if no one's in the woods to hear them. This sequoia is very noisy indeed.

It’s a convoluted mess that zig-zags all over the map. On the plus side, there are enough jokes that connect to keep you along for the ride.

The central relationship here is curious but not engaging, except for the pleasure of watching Deschanel, making All the Real Girls just a filmmaker's exercise in impressionistic style and mood.

There's enough action to keep us watching, but little incentive to return when the movie's second half - yep, another two hours - hits theaters next week.

The film's biggest problem is its psychologically false ending. Having created a complex relationship, Anselmo seems to throw up his hands at the end and admit he doesn't have a clue about how to resolve it.

Americans, for better or worse, have already seen plenty of budget-busting action flicks with half-baked political pretensions.

Among the year's biggest disappointments.

A stunner of a movie. But all those gorgeous images never add up to a full picture.

Despite an admirable effort to explore topical concerns, both director and actor are obviously overwhelmed by the immensity of the subject matter.