The movie is so heavily weighted toward the Simmons character that no one else really gets to breathe. And though McBride's shtick is brilliant - he could get rich by playing variations on this character for the next few years, and probably will.

For all its outré set pieces it never rises above the level of pretentious trash.

Feels like it was written and directed by an audience focus group in Omaha?

The bad movie in my head was far better than the one on-screen, which offers no twists at all. A twist? There isn't even a curl or a bend.

Mena Suvari has her best role since "American Beauty" as Brandi, a self-centered nursing home employee distinctly lacking in sympathy for anyone.

Beautiful but boring.

At last: Uwe Boll has made his first intentionally funny film.

The movie has two modes - very loud and extremely loud - and all of the actors are encouraged to mug their hearts out. That even includes Cusack's real-life sister Joan, normally one of the most reliable performers in the business.

Often thrilling, sometimes charming, occasionally clunky family entertainment that perhaps wisely doesn't attempt to scale the heights of "Raiders of the Lost Ark."

All too often, films about interconnected lives stumble under the weight of coincidences. Not The Edge of Heaven.

In their refusal to be up-to-the-moment, the Narnia movies are bound to age beautifully, perhaps much more so than the two Shrek films Adamson directed.

The film could have been improved if it had been less aggressively limp. But the post-adolescent, pre-adult moodiness is spot on: Everyone's favorite author is a bitter recluse, and the soundtrack heaves with the suicide sounds of Joy Division. Trier's intent is to reproduce a sweet, hazy vision of the agony of youth. Ever so elliptically, he succeeds.

Zalla constructs a suspenseful movie with no intention of sugarcoating the daily hardships of New York's underclass.

The dimly lit, exquisitely composed cinematography, by Guillermo Nieto, adds to the draw of this highly recommended movie.

This adventurously awful film is awful in many ways at once.

While this slow-starting update of "Private Lives" has plenty of laughs, the incredibly expressive (and too-seldom seen) Stevenson turns Julia's romantic dilemma into something genuinely moving. She makes A Previous Engagement something special.

I'd call it a depressing soft-core porn flick, but that overstates its titillation factor. Mainly it's just icky.

It's basically a Middle Eastern version of "The Princess Bride" with an assisted-suicide subplot.

The movie has enough big-city wickedness and merry cruelty to keep things skittering unpredictably.

Let the French stick to love stories and leave stupid comedies to Tinseltown.

I have a feeling that this is the last time we'll see a down-and-dirty Ellen Page. Her handlers have too much wrapped up in her mainstream persona to ever again allow her to do anything as daring and out of the loop as The Tracey Fragments. And that's a shame.

Turn the River lacks almost everything Eigeman has as a performer: charisma, wit and snappy delivery.

Laughs are few and far between in the innuendo-laden script attributed to Dana Fox, who's also responsible for the reprehensible "The Wedding Date."

Pity that the direction and narrative lack passion. If there's anything a story of interracial adultery needs, it's passion.

The film is an exposé only of a filmmaker's senseless contempt for the military.

As plodding and pretentious as it is ambitious.

With such smarts and outstanding special effects, I eagerly await a second Iron Man movie, which of course is virtually promised in the final scene.

It's something old, it's something new, it's something borrowed and it's something that blows.