The movie walks a tightrope between playing this misunderstood malady for laughs and sentiment.

The last act, when the movie falls apart like a cheap toy, is both a deus ex machina and an anticlimax.

The movie's really about the impressions of the original performances by newcomers Eric Christian Olsen and Derek Richardson. Olsen does an uncanny Carrey, and Richardson vaguely resembles Daniels.

The only intriguing character is the manager of the diner (and de facto fairy godmother), played by Regina King.

The latest - and really last-minute - documentary hoping to affect the presidential election is a deceptively partisan view of the Iraq War.

A classic case of good intentions and bad filmmaking.

Like a fragile Provence wine left too long in the sun, Ridley Scott's romantic comedy A Good Year spoiled somewhere between the publication of Peter Mayle's novel and this cockamamie adaptation.

If the 10th "Friday" sounds like the first "Alien," it's strictly intentional. Todd Farmer's script rips off that classic sci-fi horror film, replaces the acid-based monster with the hockey-masked Jason, adopts the self-mocking attitude of "Scream" and lets the heads, arms, legs and torsos fall where they may.

These are three characters in search of a moral pulse.

As an allegory of religious conflict, the '73 film is brilliantly constructed and ends with a punctuation mark that was shocking in its day. LaBute's movie attempts to shock, as well, and does: Given the names involved and the casting of Cage, it is shockingly bad.

To be avoided by anyone considering a vacation to anything wilder than a zoo.

Shot with an annoyingly jerky hand-held camera, Virgin is a test to stick with, and despite the best efforts of Moss, it wore me out.

Who knew that Juliette Binoche and Jean Reno could be unlikable? And yet, there they are, grating on each other's nerves (and ours) as strandees at Charles De Gaulle airport.

South Korean director Kim Ki-duk does a bizarre riff on the twisted macho ethos of abusing women until they learn to love you.

Cantor seems to have noticed how dull the actual footage is, since he relies heavily on "arty" shots and black-and-white inserts.

Unfortunately, the visuals are not compelling enough on their own to hold our interest, and a highly mannered Derek Jacobi is all wrong as the narrative voice of Nijinsky.

Though Flicker based the story on real events, the execution is so melodramatic that none of it feels remotely true.

You never know what these people are going to say or do, but you're pretty sure it will be whatever they want to.

An awkwardly executed, tedious and -- a near impossibility for a Holocaust movie -- emotionally uninvolving bore.

Unless you happen to be one yourself, chances are pretty good that you'll take an immediate dislike to the self-satisfied hipsters who populate this disappointing comedy.

The acting and dialogue is as silly as the potato sack the killer wears on his head.

A hackneyed movie of zero social, political or dramatic consequence.

The film's pace is just plain wacky, moving with the haste of a receding glacier most of the time, but then jumping ahead as if Hartley hit the gas on a time machine.

If you only want a sequence of slashings, impalements and head-squishings, you'll get your money's worth. But if you like a little movie with your mayhem, you're out of luck.

Aside from the shamelessly promoted corporate sponsors, nobody emerges from this game a winner. But the biggest losers are the ones who paid good money to watch it.

Why Travolta is slumming in B movies is anybody's guess. (I'll take a wild flier: "Battlefield Earth"?)

Obliterating the original structure and intent of "Body Snatchers" is cinema-lit blasphemy.

Though Morrow and Forlani are fine actors, they can't even fake a physical attraction between their characters, let alone orgasms.

Preposterous collegiate drama that exists simply to show pretty girls kissing, pretty boys undressing and pretty people of every sexual orientation drinking, doing drugs and otherwise wreaking postadolescent havoc.

With little dialogue, a murky night setting and the slowest of plots, this Portuguese fantasy only comes alive when it conforms to its true nature as arthouse pornography.

Even a soccer-savvy audience has better things to do - like instilling unsportsmanlike behavior in their kids or sabotaging rival teams.

Earnestness is the primary appeal of Meng Ong's clumsy melodrama.

The result is a movie that talks big, even walks big, but has no scale whatsoever.

I don't know why Redford and the white-hot Gandolfini signed on for this fiasco, but the give-and-take between them is the film's sole pleasure.

Nearly devoid of both dialogue and narrative cohesion, Yongman Kim's first feature - Part 1 of a planned trilogy inspired by Dante's "Inferno" - suggests that the founder of the popular downtown Kim's Video store should not give up his day job.

Structure overwhelms everything, but it's not as if Wicker Park has nothing to say. It's full of ugly truths about emotional frailty, and implies that stalking is a bad thing only when you're not charming enough about it.

It's strictly amateur hour.

If you're really hoping for a perfect holiday, steer clear of this stale fruitcake of a comedy.

Back to Wisteria Lane, Eva, and stay there until we call you.

Self-indulgent in the extreme, Julián Hernández's laconic ode to heartbreak feels like the work of a lovelorn teenager.

It needed a star like Clooney at its center, and a character actor like Alan Rickman as Dr. Doom. You don't expect realism from a comic-book movie, but you do want the characters to seem larger than life.

Kinsella, in his feature debut, milks cliches, caricatures and an unlikely set of coincidences to tie things up in a neat bundle.

Features amateurish acting and direction, and a going-nowhere script.

Eddie Murphy's latest comedy, The Adventures of Pluto Nash, takes place in the year 2087, which is about the earliest he can hope to be forgiven.

Not all cartoon violence; there's cartoon nudity, too. Berry was paid a well-publicized $500,000 bonus to bare her breasts in the movie.

A bizarrely off-key animated comedy.

Stambrini puts so much weight on shock value, she overlooks the matter of emotional resonance.

But look up the word "slight" in the dictionary and you could find a still from this film.

Brutal but somewhat endearing.

How do films this stale and generic continue to get made, let alone with topflight talent? Cedric has been stealing scenes from bigger names for nearly a decade; he deserves better than a few amusingly-improvised minutes at the end of his own movie. And so do we.

If it weren't for retro-gartered Milla Jovovich, I don't know why anyone would want to survive the virus that is turning humans into zombies and destroying the Earth in Resident Evil: Extinction.

Mattei's script was written in 1998, and the absence of any sense of the impact of 9/11 on New Yorkers is palpable. While watching "Love," I was thinking what great potential there was - still is - for a Manhattan "La Ronde" set in the days following 9/11, when strangers sought comfort from each other in spontaneous sexual alliances.

This is the worst performance by a pop star in a dramatic role since Madonna suited up for "Shanghai Surprise."

Beyond the cliches, there's something deeply offensive about the way Hostage exploits our empathy for children in peril.

Unfortunately, while director Steve Boyum is a successful stunt man and off-road biker, his skills do not extend to the relatively passive arena of filmmaking. Somehow, he even makes much of the action static.

Something's wrong with the math here -- the inheritance of the story's small-town hero is enlarged from $20 million to $40 billion, yet the new movie isn't worth the price of a Depression-era ticket.

Deep into Hollywood's Dumb Season comes one of its dumbest offerings.

An absolute mess with no coherent tone, story or point of view.

Flimsy and forgettable, but it does have a few worthy action and special-effects sequences.

Whatever it was in Romanian philosopher Mircea Eliade's novella Youth Without Youth that drew Francis Coppola out of a 10-year retirement to make a movie, the result is the year's most bizarre novelty item.

Unlike pop rival Britney Spears, Moore does project star quality on the screen, but she gives Halley an edge of nastiness that makes her harder to empathize with than she should be.

There is not a frame of "Cheaper" that doesn't feel contrived. It fails the most fundamental test of movie logic.

A murky swamp of a movie, Terry Gilliam's defiantly surreal Tideland finds every good idea drowning in an excess of indulgence.

Writer-director Claudia Myers' clunky debut feature makes the case that first-timers should probably focus on either writing or directing.

French director Mathieu Kassovitz Frenches this flimsy tale to death. No scene goes underplayed, no performance (save one, from Robert Downey Jr.) lacks volume, no horror cliche is forgotten.

It might have been a marketing nightmare, but if Lopez and Tyler had switched roles, it would have been a better movie.

It's just a setup for another bad sight gag that ends up where the script itself belongs, in the trash.

The teen actors grin twitchily as if tickled by sudden growth spurts, but apparently nothing can hurt their chances with the females in this libidinous zip code.

Underdeveloped and badly diluted by overlong -- and overly stylized -- forays into the drug use, street hustling and cultural alienation that mostly affects the boys' friends.

Doesn't play on the screen. P.S. Your Cat is Dead is a stage-locked, two-character play on a static set, and though Guttenberg takes it outside for a couple of scenes, it remains that on film.

It's too bad the film never makes good on its early promise, but clearly, the rolling fireballs and flying bullets are the priority.

There is a fair share of turkeys at the multiplex this week, but none are quite as overcooked as Extreme Ops.

Phelan makes nice use of the New York locations, but all the trees in Central Park can't make up for a clichéd script and characters who speak entirely in platitudes.

Since Adam Sussman's script is as lazy as Asif Kapadia's direction is disjointed, nothing ever makes sense, even after the anticlimatic explanation is revealed.

It's described as a black comedy, but you can forget the comedy part. There wasn't so much as a snicker at the screening I attended, though I may have heard a snore or two.

Nothing in the movie rings true, least of all its depiction of gambling, both in casinos and in the bookie world that ultimately drives the story.

[A] straight-to-video-quality mess.

Possibly the sourest revenge movie ever, Audition starts off as a sweet, low-key romance, then abruptly turns into a grisly, sadistic thriller.

What's funny for 5 minutes doesn't make for a full-length movie.

Campion has made something that's almost unbearably pretentious.

If the Founding Fathers had known National Treasure would be the result of their efforts to forge a new nation, they might have reached for the Wite-Out.

So riddled with plot holes and implausible actions, you can't help feeling insulted by it.

The movie is quite off its rocker: Jerry Springer, Chrisopher Walken, Tom Waits as a roadside prophet, a miscast, nervous Lucy Liu as an FBI agent -- it's a feverish, violent jumble that's shot as if high on mescaline -- the drug, not the salad.

This vapid '80 punk party reeks of 200 Cigarettes.

This is the kind of misfire that can take everyone down with it. It's not just bad, it's mean-bad.

Sadly, a film about betrayal is ultimately betrayed by the film maker's own lack of conviction.

Alternates between being amusingly pretentious and studiously dull.

This time around, the cult director dispenses with the feminism, the satire, and even the issues, so he can concentrate on his true passion: the dissecting.

ALTHOUGH IT DOES HAVE a plot of sorts, Black Sheep isn't really a movie it's more like a series of "Saturday Night Live" sketches highlighting Chris Farley's fumbling fatboy shtick. [2 Feb 1996, p.36]

There's an art to making a good spoof, but good luck finding it in Dance Flick, not only because the movie goes for easy toilet humor, but because it often relies on it to stay afloat.

Gets old fast.

If you go searching for an original idea in this tiresome thriller about a soul-sucking demon doll, you won’t find one.

Hoping for a little emotional manipulation with your popcorn? Look no further.

While the first "Independence Day" was genuinely big, dumb fun, its sequel only manages to be a bigger, dumber bore.

This empty, immature romantic comedy ultimately feels as if it's filled with all the hot air that separates New York and San Francisco, yet still manages to be a suffocating bore.

The acting offers little relief. Fassbender gives a super serious performance in a movie that needed his natural sense of humor. Playing his Abstergo doctor, Cotillard's accent is so bizarre and disconcerting, it's impossible to believe she’s the same actress who’s been so amazing in everything else she's done. As for Jeremy Irons, who plays her scientist father, it's hard to imagine this is anything more than a payday.

Well, you've got to say this for Death Race: It knows what it is and doesn't apologize for it. What it is, incidentally, is junk.

Presumed to be Nicolas Refn's foray into the horror genre, but apparently, no one bothered to tell the filmmaker that.