Billed as a comedy about a single dad with three girls, the movie is essentially another sudser about the plight of upscale black women in Atlanta.

Grant hasn't had any real chemistry with a female co-star since Julia Roberts in "Notting Hill," but Barrymore works so hard at it and is so charming that you might be fooled.

Credit Sissako for entertainingly blending serious international issues with the daily comings and goings of village life. A bit more Glover wouldn't have hurt - but you can't have everything.

Dull and dreary prequel.

While there are some scattered laughs, the flimsy and nonsensical script - combined with the sledgehammer direction by Brian Robbins, make the similarly themed "Big Momma's House" look like Noel Coward.

The cast includes Oscar winner Louise Fletcher (Nurse Ratched herself) and Henry Thomas of "E.T.," and the special effects look like they were executed on somebody's laptop.

Like warriors themselves, you will be left to sort through a jumble of emotions: pride and sorrow, bitterness and gratitude. [09 Feb 2007, p.43]

Burning Annie has funny moments, but it suffers from an overflow of characters.

There are touching interviews with a couple of former inmates...The most riveting part of The Decomposition of the Soul is their return to the prison, which was closed in 1989 and turned into a memorial to its victims.

Thirty years after "Annie Hall," the beloved actress is scraping below the bottom of the barrel with this desperately unfunny farce, in which she mugs and pratfalls in the worst performance of her entire career.

It's nicely photographed but slow-moving, dull and utterly predictable.

Dividing its loyalties between documentary and fictional narrative, it lacks the advantages of belonging to either side.

The film, made by two Cuban-American exiles (and produced by their friend, Charlize Theron), makes an ironic point about Cuba: This is a land where the grandparents are revolutionaries (or at least say they are) but the kids are yearning for capitalist globalization.

Would that somebody had fired Gurwitch before she could have finished Fired!

Rulfo adds punch to his material with speeded-up visuals and an eye-popping, six-minute helicopter shot of the entire 10-mile project - which alone is worth the price of admission.

Woody Allen certainly hasn't managed anything remotely this funny lately.

Williams appears to be having trouble keeping his eyes open, and the audience will, too.

So why does the Democratic Party hate him so much? The answer, as this valuable (if blatantly pro-Nader) documentary makes clear, is hypocrisy.

As for the script, a wittier director would have spotted the absurd elements and delivered a horror-comedy instead of a straight-faced bore.

The chick comedy-drama Catch and Release may look bland, but it's not. It's worse. To rise to the level of blandness, it would need to have a few gallons of Tabasco dumped into it.

This spoof of "The Da Vinci Code," "Pirates of the Caribbean," "Harry Potter," "The Chronicles of Narnia" and other recent blockbusters piles up sex gags, toilet gags and make-you-gag gags.

In the hands of the formerly promising director Joe Carnahan, this stylish, nihilistic, hugely derivative mash-up of Tarantino and Guy Ritchie (before wife Madonna ruined his career) is fun for roughly half an hour.

The biblically themed Seraphim Falls moseys along very slowly, climaxing with a lengthy series of flashbacks and an appearance by Anjelica Huston as a medicine woman who may or not be the devil.

Colpaert makes nice use of blue and green hues, and he makes some valid points about the Iraqi war. But the script lacks coherence and ends with a 180-degree flip that lessens the impact of what has gone before.

Peled was harassed at every turn by Chinese officials, but he managed to get this shocking film made. That's just one reason China Blue is worthy of praise.

German guilt gets a vigorous workout in the penetrating and symbolically important documentary Two or Three Things I Know About Him.

The Hitcher is the Jessica Simpson of psycho killer flicks - cheerfully in touch with its own brainlessness.

At heart, The Italian is a Dickensian tale that paints a vivid portrait of post-Glasnost Russia en route to a four-handkerchief ending.