So what if the movie isn't finger-lickin' good like the original? The performances by Hanks as a crook and Irma P. Hall as his honorable landlady are mighty tasty.

Either an airless allegory about opportunistic Americans or another one of the director's parables of female persecution. OK, maybe it's both. But life is too short for three hours of misanthropy and misogyny.

What Never Die Alone is is a hackneyed tale of vengeance set in the 'hood, teeming with stock characters, slo-mo gunplay, and rampant misogyny.

It's a trippy but tender examination of human emotions, relationships, all-consuming love.

If Taking Lives starts off with a modicum of wit and creepy-crawly scares, it winds up somewhere else altogether: in the cliche-strewn land of preposterous red herrings.

This film plays out like one of those trigger-happy video games -- it's all cranial splatter. Word to the squeamish: Dawn of the Dead merits a very hard R rating. The depictions of violence are exceedingly graphic.

Here, love and violence are random, everyone's a fool for love, and tomfoolery often has a shocking twist. And every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

Kari's film, witty and sad, is a spare, small thing, but Noi has a poetry about it, and a poignancy.

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.

Bloody, bone-chilling fun.

An entertaining foray into a world of spy guys, stakeouts and secret government machinations, Spartan teems with the kind of terse crypto-speak that is the playwright and filmmaker's stock-in-trade.

The performances are uniformly strong - nuanced, realistic, lacking any wild, flailing emoting.

If the words "Gentlemen, start your engines" set your heart pounding, this is the Imax experience for you.

It's the dynamic between the three leads, Rawlins, Sives and Henderson - and the young McKinlay, who's like a miniature Shirley Henderson - that is this oddball and bittersweet story's pulsing heart.

The second-best film parody (after The Brady Bunch Movie) of a '70s TV phenom that unaccountably looks better the further you get from it.

Hidalgo is the first Middle East western.

The film turns into a story of corruption on many levels, and it moves fast, without a scrap of fat in the telling.

A slasher spoof of sorts, except that unlike the "Scream" pics, scant effort seems to have gone into the spoofing aspect of the story.

By Twisted's final twist, though, it's all Judd can do to keep a straight face.

Bittersweet and funny.

Too much Good Friday and not enough Easter Sunday. Emphasizing Jesus' agony over His ecstasy, Gibson has delivered a blood-drenched epic more stunning for its brutal violence than for its depiction of the calvary.

It's hilarious - in a Scandinavian Sartre-esque sort of way.

A riotously awful biopic rife with stereotypes and boxing movie cliches, Against the Ropes represents -- among other things -- a woeful turn in its star's career.

A toothless political satire set in a Maine coastal village. It plays like six subplots in search of a sitcom.

The plain, reportorial style of Lost Boys -- which simply records its subjects in various settings and situations -- results in a film that doesn't preach, doesn't politicize.

I don't think 50 First Dates is a great movie, or a particularly funny one, but I admired its romanticism and its gentle plea for the acceptance of difference. Of how many romantic comedies can you say they are sweet and disturbing?

Terribly slight and a little off.

It's a feminist nightmare, the world brought to life -- in hard-hitting documentary style.