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.