Plays like "Sixteen Candles" meets "Beetlejuice." Yet for all the film's frantic pace, this plot plods, even for 'tweens at whom this suburban-girls-take-Manhattan fantasy is obviously targeted.

A raunchy spoof of the disaster-movie lampoon Airplane! - does everything to get the laugh. And in the way that a broken watch is right twice a day, a shotgun comedy like this one occasionally hits its target.

That a detente between the cliques is unthinkable, that they could never eat at the same table, is one of many assumptions that makes Sleepover such a downer.

Usually Amy Adams can work all kinds of magic with her wide-eyed gaze and wistful smile. But these attributes aren't assets here, they are distancing devices.

For such a formulaic vigilante film, The Punisher has a far better cast than it deserves.

A vaguely creepy and mildly diverting rom-com.

Some of the most tasteless and un-PC comedy in the film is also the funniest - Farrelly Brothers-style humor that plays off the Bateman character's physical limitations.

The ads for The Sweetest Thing promise that if you loved "There's Something About Mary" and "My Best Friend's Wedding," then you can't miss this latest Cameron Diaz vehicle. Well, miss it.

A raunchy romp through the peeping-Tomism, potty humor, raging hormones and social humiliation that are standard issue in the Hollywood high-school sex comedy.

Judah Friedlander and Lindsay Lohan are striking, respectively, as a Lennon paparazzo and a fan creeped out by Chapman.

This is no "Raging Bull."

What Rock fans will sorely miss in Down to Earth is the earthiness and outrageous hilarity of his stand-up act.

The film quickly turns unintentionally, and unrelentingly, awkward.

Hemsworth, who is Gale Hawthorne in "The Hunger Games" and the brother of the Hemsworth who stars as "Thor", has maybe one arrow in his acting quiver - he can look engaged.

While the plot is dumb and the script is worse, watching aliens explode in spectacular fashion isn't the worst excuse to spend to two hours in air-conditioning.

A brazen, earsplitting, eye-popping, oddly satisfying action extravaganza, though it veers wildly off-target in its second hour.

Isn't a good movie, at least by any conventional definition of the word good. But it's not a bad movie, either. It's a Bob Dylan movie.

This isn't a movie, it's an animatronic theme-park ride - an artificially processed, easily digestible treat for kids.Ho, ho hum.

Just because you can come up with names such as Azeroth, Durotan, Orgrim, and Grommash Hellscream doesn't mean you're J.R.R. Tolkien, people.

Muniz is quite winning as a plucky teen who is constantly being thrown into situations over his head. But the usually reliable Anthony Anderson e-mails in his performance as Cody's handler.

My advice: Skip Beyond Borders and write a check to the Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders.

Not exactly a hundred million dollars' worth of classic comedy.

It's hard to say with certainty whether it's insufficient plot or insufficient interpretation that's responsible for Travolta's waxwork performance.

Hollywood keeps turning out boxing movies. Price of Glory is the latest to step into the ring and face an increasingly no-win situation

Reiner, who made "This is Spinal Tap," "The Sure Thing," "When Harry Met Sally" -- memorable movies all -- has made this silly slice of Lean Cuisine. And that, in the end, makes Alex and Emma an utter tragedy.

Identity theft and credit-card fraud never looked as exciting or sexy as in Plastic, a frothy little heist movie from Britain that starts off with great promise, only to devolve midway into an empty derivative shell of a film.

Sappy script. Cheesy supernaturalism. Tired satire.

An altogether enjoyable ride.

Get the soundtrack; wait for the movie to come to CMT.

An abhorrent cyberthriller starring a compelling Diane Lane.

Though the humor of Black Knight never quite achieves the giddiness of a Monty Python comedy, Lawrence creates a character more lovable than either Bill or Ted on either of their excellent adventures.

A flat-out cynical attempt to launch a new Lethal Weapon-like franchise.

As an account of how for-profit big business literally rips a consumer's heart out, Repo Men is too graphic for me.

While stylishly filmed and edited, Boogeyman is filled with every imaginable fright cliche... It's like a meal consisting entirely of airy hors d'oeuvres.

Wood, for her part, can appear sad, or seductive, or mysterious, or happy, or lovestruck, or deeply troubled. Gabi is also very good with a gun, so look out.

Mildly enjoyable despite its basic mediocrity.

This one is so bad that even Ed Norton couldn't get this mess to move through the sewer.

This invitation to look down upon the stupidity of numskulls is one that should be declined as swiftly as a call to poke fun at Special Olympians.

A dark, shaky, standard-issue superhero picture.

Perfect Stranger is the Egg MacGuffin of whodunits, a cheesy affair that casts so many baited lures that they tangle each other and don't hook you.

Half-baked, both in plot and execution, this spoof's for adolescent boys who find Minotaur private parts amusing and Queen Amidala in a chastity belt sexy.

They has a low-budget, generic feel -- but also enough sense to know that unseen menace is a lot creepier than explicit gore.

The film's focus on the contest between the two agents does throw the film off-balance.

Mildly diverting but slight, the screwball comedy Gray Matters changes it up, more or less creating its own genre, the curveball farce.

An unintentional high-tech hoot.

Getting Even With Dad desperately panders to the youth it hopes to attract. [17 Jun 1994, p.03]

Envy makes a pretty entertaining three-minute trailer. If only they'd left it at that.

Monster-in-Law, where Bridezilla meets Godzilla, is a comedy so anemic, so toxic, that even Dracula wouldn't bite.

This film about a career gal's date with fate careers out of control.

Hobbled by a laughably bad script and a uniformly uncharismatic cast.

Is there a limit to this incessant princessitude?

Blended throws a lot of things on the screen, but in the end, it has to confront its awkward and artificial "romance." And that's just ugly.

Feeble and formulaic.

As slapstick, it is painfully slow, so much so that one can see every overstretched rubber band and frayed shoelace keeping the film barely together. [02 Dec 1994, p.03]

Watching people be miserable with each other for the movie's run-time does not always make for a pleasant experience.

You want to cut Cop Out some slack because it's just so darn eager to please. So let's grant that it will make a reliably fun companion when it's on cable 10 times a week.

The movie bogs down in tiresome good guys vs. bad guys action cliches.

Plot contrivances, including an ominous cowboy-hatted figure who stalks Bitsey and her tagalong intern (Gabriel Mann), undermine the story's serious political themes.

If the Brothers Grimm had devoted themselves to farce rather than scary fairy tales, they might have produced something like Seventh Son, a whacko sword-and-sorcery exercise.

It's not original, but unlike some of this summer's movies (such as The Island and Stealth), The Cave knows its place. Its job is to deliver a few jolty thrills and a couple of laughs and wrap things up before it starts to get too dumb.

The acting is better than the script deserves and Lexi Alexander's cut-to-the-hearse direction lends the film considerable kick.

Maybe if there was something going with the dialogue - snappy Chandlerisms, say, or even just sentences that made sense - the fussy digital artifice of The Spirit wouldn't seem so, well, dispiriting.

The homoerotic subtext of the whole buddy movie oeuvre has never received quite the explicit lampooning it gets in this quirky, crash-and-burn action-comedy. [6 Sept 1996, p.8]

What ensues may be predictable, but the slapstick performances of Rudd and Bell are anything but. They court, they spark, and a few times they catch comic fire.

Most of it plays like Jackass.

It may not be the worst war epic ever made - that probably would be "Battlefield Earth" -- but it's darn close to being an unqualified disaster of that magnitude.

Six guys and a gal who flatline on arrival. Easily the lamest action-adventure fantasy since “Wild Wild West.”

It's the sort of stuff younger viewers will love.

Not a great film. Or particularly good. In fact, it's fairly bad as B-movies go.

A schmaltzy, deeply sentimentalized drama about American slavery and the rise of the Underground Railroad.

The Boy Next Door aspires to be a cautionary tale, but it unspools like an infomercial - with a shockingly gory ending.

At its best, Queen is campy fun like the Vincent Price horror classics of the '60s. At its worst, it implodes in a series of very bad special effects.

Has a low-key tone that works in its favor for a time.

It would have been better to nix the drama completely and keep Madea's Halloween outing strictly about the laughs.

As doggy movies go, this one gets two paws out of four.

Parents in a masochistic mood can compound the headache-inducing experience by paying extra for the 3-D version.

This is an A-list cast toiling on a C-list screenplay.

The film drifts along on a stream of humiliation jokes - physical, emotional, sexual, hairpiece-ial.

Overall, the effect is closer to a Monty Python skit or a Village People music vid than a serious film about civil rights.

Faced with the script's weak humor and feeble stabs at irony, Schwartzman and Stiller turn it way up, setting the dial at "hammy."

The jokes are unabashedly pitched at 12-year-old boys, with flatulence, masturbation and excretions as the leading themes.

Profoundly knuckleheaded.

With no clear idea how to end the movie, which has come to resemble an excessive episode of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, writer/director Stuart Beattie (G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra) uses an old but still effective Hollywood trick: He blows up everything on the screen to smithereens.

It has its moments of swaggering camaraderie, but more often just feels generic, derivative and done to death.

However insulting the script is to the formidable talents of Clayburgh and Tambor, they turn in Shinola performances.

Nicely timed to cash in on the Ebola panic, Cabin Fever: Patient Zero - the prequel to the gross-out franchise about a lethal flesh-eating virus and its party-hardy victims - isn't going to do much for the tourism trade in the Dominican Republic.

Harmless, mindless and shameless.

It's a fun gimmick -- the sartorial equivalent of those red shoes in the fairy tale that made an ordinary girl dance like Terpsichore -- if not an altogether fun movie.

The film would be a moth-eaten mess without the wisecracking animals. Not that it's funny with them.

Like most Lee films, She Hate Me is gasp-worthy, with something to offend everyone. I will not say that I liked it. I will say that like "Bamboozled," it exasperates and resonates.

A vast disappointment.

13 Ghosts is the type of project that all parties concerned will have to live down for the rest of their lives.

If Martin Scorsese updated "The Roaring Twenties," the classic Jimmy Cagney movie about World War I vets who come home and find that the only jobs available are with gang lords and bootleggers, it would look a lot like Sean Kirkpatrick's rookie feature, Cost of a Soul.

Rather like listening to Vladimir Horowitz play "Chopsticks."

This so-called comedy is a frayed string of anxious jokes about whether male bonding is manly or sissy.

Premonition is an odd little thing, with a protagonist in a protracted fugue state and a plot that doesn't know whether its coming or going. Or maybe it does.

This unabashedly stupid comedy is, well, unabashedly stupid.

Travolta, a bit portly (or is it starboardly?), phones in his performance from his place in Maine; Vaughn is ice-cool but not especially convincing; the kid is OK, and Polo is a blank.