Visually dazzling but ultimately dizzying ride, a trippy suspenser that gets tripped up on its own deja vu voodoo.

Partly because of Caine and partly because of meticulous work by veteran director Norman Jewison, The Statement is a fiction done so effectively, it rings true -- even slick lines that may otherwise be rancid.

An unmitigated, inexplicable, unforgivable flop.

The Situation deserves credit for not trying to reduce the events in Iraq to facile equations. There is corruption and cynicism on all sides: the U.S. diplomats and military, the Sunni leaders, the thugs in cop uniforms, the local powerbrokers.

Two Night Stand, is a clever, if uneven, romcom about Generation Y's conflicted, paradoxical views of sex and love. Featuring strong dialogue and terrific performances, the film has moments of near-brilliance, but falls apart with a lame, conventional ending.

Surrogates, which borrows tone and content freely from "I, Robot," is all windup and no pitch.

For its amusing premise, Fanboys is scarily flat.

For a film that strives so hard to show the sheer messiness of real people's lives, Burning Plain does have an impossibly neat ending.

The playwright, actor, director and drag queen (yes, his bewigged and be wild Madea makes a brief and totally gratuitous appearance in his new film) knows how to give human dimension, and a dimension of humor, to the cliches and stereotypes.

Keener makes this sometimes inert but always intimate tale of love and ambition burst with dynamic energy. Keener doesn't just have attitude, she has maditude.

One moment it's farcical comedy, the next it's gruesome melodrama. The movie never finds the right tone.

A coming-of-age film that has the jaunty mood and egg-cream flavor of a Philip Roth memoir.

Bobby Jones plays out much like a round of golf - slow, old-fashioned, tediously long, and lacking in drama.

A mid-point twist is particularly ridiculous, and in an attempt to reconcile this turning point, the final act of the movie becomes a mess.

For soccer aficionados, Kicking & Screaming boasts some fairly cool play, courtesy of Alessandro Ruggiero and Francesco Liotti, two kids who play "the Italians."

Hesher has its genuinely affecting scenes, but too much of the time it feels false and shallow.

Someone should check Joe Carnahan for performance enhancement drugs. Smokin' Aces, the wild ride of a movie he scripted and directed, is so pumped up, manic and mayhem-packed that it practically shoots sweat off the screen.

A likably energetic star vehicle for English sports god Vinnie Jones.

Secret in Their Eyes is notable for its top-tier cast - Julia Roberts, Nicole Kidman, and Chiwetel Ejiofor are the leads - and for its utter lack of credulity and good sense.

The glaring weakness of Country Strong is James, underwritten and ambiguous, more like Kelly's pimp than her manager.

The trailers already have given away the "surprise" cameos in The Expendables, so try not to blink when Stallone goes into a church (shades of John Woo) to meet his mystery boss, played by a bald-pated, trademark smirking Bruce Willis.

There's nothing Disneyesque about this bomb except the forced levity of its musical score.

Directed by Clark Johnson in an efficient and occasionally exhilarating style that points to the Emmy-winner's TV cop-show pedigree ("Homicide," "The Wire," "NYPD Blue").

There is no shape or pacing to Daniel Petrie's movie. It's like a bottle of soda left uncapped. So thus a story that promised effervescence ends up being flat.

A loving ode to screwball comedies from the Golden Age of Hollywood that never approaches the films it pays homage to.

The 3D effects are of a gimmicky 1956 vintage, with hands thrusting from the screen to give the illusion of reaching out and touching the audience.

A casualty of its own clumsy storytelling.

A meditation on guilt, remorse and redemption -- is unrelentingly heavy.

The muddled huddle that is Necessary Roughness is one long fumble strewn with offensive lines.

What this arid and arty exercise offers is the opportunity for a bunch of actors, many of them tethered to TV series, to deliver theatrical monologues pulsing with misogyny and narcissism. It's like second-rate Neil Labute.

Well-intentioned if cloying, Miracles from Heaven has an appealing cast and an accessible take on spirituality.

Despite the appeal of cobra-eyed Thornton and bunny-nosed Heder, Scoundrels trips early, and often.

For the first half-hour I, too, demurred. And then the irresistible force that is Hugh Jackman -- or was it his swoony Leopold? -- swept me off my seat and into the movie.

Not up to the freshness and inventiveness of its predecessors.

While the movie is content to be merely atmospheric, the performances convince you that here are two misfits who might be a perfect fit.

Though one wishes Graff's eye were as developed as his keen ear, he elicits rafter-raising musical performances from Latifah, Palmer, and Jordan that are irresistible fun.

By no means is it a great movie, but it is great slapstick fun, one of summer's guilty pleasures.

This movie feels like it has a million jokes, and every single one arrives with a lethal thud.

Willis is always on target, but Last Man Standing is an aimless excuse for the kind of action at which Hill undeniably excels. [20 Sep 1996, p.03]

Krueger's comedy doesn't always spark, but its underlying intelligence - not to mention Graham's eyes - shines through.

Begins to take on a striking resemblance to the infamously bad "Eyes Wide Shut."

Feels thoroughly canned.

A script with the most underdeveloped characters and spectacularly realized visuals since "Titanic."

The Jacket is both a genre movie and a symptom, a gothic treatment of Gulf War syndrome.

Given this swoon-inducer, Summit Entertainment would be well-advised to set up fainting couches in the multiplex lobby and provide smelling salts to those who need them.

The set pieces are fun, if not as spectacular as those in Jon Favreau's adaptation of Kipling's similar "The Jungle Book." And the plot moves at a nice pace.

Handsomely photographed by Eric Schmidt and nicely underplayed by the actors, the film relies too much on its jukebox soundtrack to convey mood.

Completely unappealing people.

Hostage may well be the first action flick cited both for child abuse and audience abuse. In a singularly sadistic and degrading way it has something to offend everyone.

A dull, drab and pointless rehash, Walking Tall ironically manages to diminish the Rock's stature as both a leading man and an action star.

The kind of saccharine exercise that ought to do wonders for the cause of atheism. [15 July 1994, p.03]

Delivery Man, with its democratic band of half-siblings and its feel-good view of humankind, is what it is: a reproductive remake that will make you laugh. More than once or twice.

Tillman, who made a splash last year with his hip-hop hit "Notorious," does a nice job of calling into question the assumption, shared by most genre films, that vengeance is the only right course of action.

Where Mike Figgis' film, with Nicolas Cage and Elisabeth Shue, bore deeply and darkly into emotional territory, The Center of the World turns out to be just as fake as its setting.

No one has done the journey quite like Takeshi Kitano in Kikujiro

Cheerful mishmash.

Watts, who is one of the film's executive producers, brings a taut intelligence to the proceedings, but her character, like Roth's, is more archetype than actual person.

A creaky, cliched, feel-good family drama about learning to stop and smell the roses - and planting a vegetable garden while you're at it - Uncle Nino is shameless, sappy fare.

Hollywood's latest entry in that tried-and-true genre, the disaster movie, is . . . well, it's like . . . a totally gnarly roller-coaster ride!

The glitter and clinking of Rodman's collection of body jewelry are supposed to blind one to the dopiness of the screenplay for Double Team. [4 Apr 1997, p.10]

An innocuously smutty road comedy.

Did I laugh? A handful of times. Did I cringe? For 101 minutes.

The best reason to see Along Came Polly is the supporting cast.

An unusually atmospheric outing. Splatter fans may be disappointed, because Nakata isn't interested in a body count.

So suggestively atmospheric is Amelia Vincent's cinematography and Robin Standefer's art direction that mood -- and of course Jackson's performance -- sustains the movie.

A pleasant production that retained the familiar touchpoints of the TV show while adding big-screen pizzazz. [03 Apr 1998, p.14]

Batman v Superman lacks the levity (forced or otherwise) of a typical Marvel Universe entry. But Snyder's superpowered epic does have a sense of import and grandeur about it.

The chief appeal of this affectionate story is its embrace of those who are not thinner, richer and more glamorous than the moviegoers.

A third-generation performer, this daughter of actor-director Ron Howard makes a stunning feature debut.

Cute, cloying and catastrophically predictable.

Entertainingly goofy for about 30 minutes. And then, for the next two hours-plus, it's agony.

Though his film is a tad choppy and a lot chatty, Hindman elicits sympathetic performances from leads who demonstrate a deep understanding of movie physics.

The Bronze, for all its crudeness and lewdness (Melissa Raunch, anyone?) and wonky comedy, is actually a good old-fashioned tale of redemption.

Jobs is a just-the-facts - and fiddling-with-the-facts - dramatization, forgoing any kind of deeper psychological exploration of the man and his motivations, his demons and dreams.

Illuminated by dim candles and the rare glimmer of sun, the movie is grainy, closed-in, and likely to cause spasms of claustrophobia.

The script is boilerplate, the wit pretty much witless.

Dizzyingly incoherent and subversively surreal, this sophomore effort from the man who made the great, strange "Donnie Darko" is certain to have its fans. I'm not going to be one of them.

Guaranteed to keep you on tenterhooks from beginning to end - and without much gore. Dowdle and company trade in the usual trappings of the genre for a tantalizing blend of tension, suspense, and mystery.

Rarely has sex on screen been so aggressively anti-erotic.

Christopher Walken has the best moments in the whole thing, portraying the wacked-out auteur of the Gwen-and-Eddie vehicle. Sadly, he's only in America's Sweethearts a few hilarious minutes.

Loaded with careening car chases and rooftop runs, glass-shattering shootouts and exploding fireballs, Killer Elite offers more than enough to keep action junkies happy.

A touching, family-friendly entertainment

Think Jerry Lewis doing Eminem, or maybe it's Eminem doing Jerry Lewis (or maybe it's Pauly Shore doing Vanilla Ice), and you've got B-Rad.

What Eagle Eye wants to do is show us technology's dark side: all the stuff that's there to make our lives easier - ATMs, PDAs, iPods, GPS, cell phones, PCs, "smart" houses - turned against us in a vast conspiracy.

City Slickers I managed to poke fun at the whole Iron John/discover-your- maleness movement at the same time the film was able to embrace it. But while City Slickers II tries for the same mix, it doesn't work. Instead, we get shots of three smelly, unshaven guys getting blubbery and hugging each other. [10 June 1994, p.03]

"Lousy times make lousy people," someone opines, and maybe that's the point Romero's trying to drive home.

Vera retains her dignity throughout, which is more than can be said for human company, and she seems to be having more fun. That's as it should be in an elephant comedy one soon forgets. [04 Nov 1996, p.D06]

Backwards - its title referring to the wisdom that life is lived forward but understood backward - has no forward propulsion.

This gang of highly skilled dancers (with the guidance of debut director Scott Speer) delivers a sequence of spectacular group numbers that truly pop in 3-D.

Quite literally the blockbuster of the year.

Grant's film plays like a two-hour episode of "Friends" intercut with "Seventh Heaven." Those sounds you hear are wisecrack, heartbreak, heartbreak, wisecrack, wisecrack.

The Omen remake is creepily efficient. Unlike one of the newfangled horrorfests, it doesn't drown you in brackish atmosphere and surround-sound you with techno music.

A comedy about friendship, faith and the acting life, Le Grand Role is unabashedly corny and tear-jerking - and still quite likable.

This violently comic caper has some spunky charm going for it -- but has a lot of self-consciously hip, studied wackiness going against it.

In Jersey Girl, Kevin Smith wears his heart on his sleeve - and on his pants, socks, boxers and backward-facing baseball cap.

He emerges stinking, and so, alas, does Fathers' Day. [9 May 1997, p.03]

It's the emotional equivalent of a big shrug.

Ready-made for Valentine's Day, The Vow is, like the offerings at Cafe Mnemonic, a total sugar overload.