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.

Instead of paying homage to these creepy creatures of bygone Hollywood, Sommers seems to be unwittingly lampooning them. The first few minutes of Van Helsing, shot in black and white, look like outtakes from Mel Brooks' gagfest "Young Frankenstein."

Half a century after its release, Godzilla couldn't be more current.

A movie every American should see, although parts of it are close to unwatchable - notably an operating room sequence in which a pair of surgeons performs a gastric bypass, or "obesity surgery," as they like to call it, on a dangerously overweight patient.

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

Unravels in a series of spooky dream sequences, dopey detective work, and a couple of richly hambone-ian De Niro soliloquies.

Laughably predictable and lamentably unfunny, Laws of Attraction practically creaks from the effort exerted by its cast, straining to bring snap and panache to a hackneyed exercise. Sno Ball, anyone?

Alternately intriguing then not, and, like its subject, features a lot of lip gloss and girl-on-girl zingers. And like most contemporary movies, Mean Girls has no ending.

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

At turns funny, sweet, sad, trenchant and telling. It's a gem.

It has a quiet thoughtfulness that never comes close to being draggy, and a wisdom that is anything but obtuse. It's a film of many themes.

It's the stuff of soap opera, infused with a nonchalant, David Lynch-like surrealism and a nutball Canadian humor. Beer - because of the baroness, and because this is Canada - flows freely.

While 13 Going on 30 is too formulaic to sustain the delicacy of emotion that gave "Big" its appeal, it has tour-de-farce moments that made screenwriters Josh Goldsmith and Cathy Yuspa's "What Women Want" such a monster hit.

It is a good hour too long, although it does boast Christopher Walken.

It is the more satisfying of the two installments - less over-the-top, arterial-gushing violence and more investigation into character, motives, back-story.

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

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

Also quite fine is the film's musical score from David Byrne, as unsettling and edgy as the story.

Except for a handful of scenes, Hancock's film isn't good enough to be memorable. Neither is it bad enough to be entirely forgettable. It's just one of those compromised movies that makes one look forward to the director's cut.

Too bad the filmmakers didn't trust the material. For Ella doesn't need music and references to other, better, movies to cast its unique spell.

Where the first pic breezed along with gags and gunplay, this forced follow-up is artificial to the hilt - fueled on a kind of trying-too-hard hilarity that makes even good actors look bad.

A tale of childhood innocence and adult corruption - and the point where the two intersect - I'm Not Scared is a lyrical thriller inspired by the run of kidnappings that befell Italy in the 1970s.

Apart from Williams' presence, director Christopher Erskin's feature debut isn't worth the price of submission. It's not a road trip; it's a road trap.

The film - despite being a half-hour too long - is a rocking, rolling supernatural spectacle.

Despite lovely songs from k.d. lang and Bonnie Raitt (written by Beauty and the Beast composer Alan Menken), this range is about as serene as a hen party.

Stiles is lovely, forthright and believable, so much so that when the scene shifts back to storybook Denmark (actually shot in Prague), she grounds this fluff in recognizable reality.

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.

Proves that the most local story is sometimes the most universal, the simplest tale sometimes the most complex.