Even 3-year-olds deserve better.

In the rather weak ending, we aren't sure what will become of Peter and Santino.

A sweet but weightless and witless romantic comedy, Sandler is not only deeply unfunny, he's deliberately unfunny.

The subtext is singular: The presence of potentially dehumanizing technology serves to make the characters seem more human.

Gorgeous and saddening, Osama makes the human-scale claim for the overthrow of governments ruled by the iron hand of religious fundamentalism far more persuasively than any of the rhetoric coming out of the White House or No. 10 Downing St.

The first "Barbershop" was no classic but, as so often with sequels, if this were the first there would be no second.

Ordinary folks working together to triumph over incredible odds, depicted in a Disney film that doesn't overdose on sentiment? That's the real miracle.

For all the flash and sparkle, there's little heat. The Dreamers wants to be "First Tango in Paris." It's more like "Last Tango Under Glass."

It's "Ocean's Eleven" for people who can't count past six.

At 80 minutes, it feels truncated and abandoned -- a sketch of a comic thriller rather than the real thing.

For children old enough to get the jokes about Vicodin but young enough to innocently fantasize about movie stars, Win a Date With Tad Hamilton! will be a perfectly pitched midwinter treat.

Isn't a complete waste of time. If Kutcher seeks to transition from national joke to lightweight actor, he's made a decent stab at it.

Remove the razzle-dazzle provided by Azaria, Hoffman, Baldwin, the gross jokes and that ferret, and you wind up with a pretty dull and ordinary face.

The movie is simple fun.

This is a first-class film that will appeal to anyone who wants to see a plausible, witty, absorbing human story told well -- indeed, told gorgeously.

Collette proves herself worthy of carrying a movie with a performance that runs the gamut of human emotion without striking one false note.

A handsome work of impressive sweep dotted with fine performances. It offers a few fine moments of wit, fear and emotional intimacy. But it rarely pulses with vital life.

Affleck is in the middle, engaging in derring-do, pitching woo to Uma Thurman and making the whole thing come off as less exciting than it should have been.

Hogan whips up a high-energy family entertainment that fairly erases memory of the other filmed versions of Barrie's tale.

This is harsh and acid stuff, but it's exhilarating on a number of counts. For one thing, Jenkins moves with real authority between scenes of low life, tender intimacy and gripping violence; made on the cheap, her film has the iron certainty of the best art.

Still, if it doesn't go down in film history as a key moment in Roberts' career, it might very well be remembered as a breakthrough for one of its trio of rising stars.

Grim, sordid and, as it progresses, increasingly dunderheaded.

The result is an overly long, overly cute film that is far too tickled with its own naughtiness. It truly is an instance of if you've seen the trailer, you've seen the film.

From the acting to the special effects to the landscapes to the cinematography, editing and music, to the details of decor, wardrobe and armaments, we never once feel that we are in anything but the hands of an absolute master of the medium.

Johansson, fittingly, is the focus. In her face, as in the faces of Vermeer's handful of captivating subjects, the viewer intuits whole stories and worlds.

Tedious "message movie" proves hunting war criminals amid right-wing Catholic conspirators can be plenty dull.

As cinema, it's polenta, but it's made palatable by the piquant sauce with which these two great stars season it.

There's something personal going on, something deeper than slapstick. It makes a sometimes flat film shimmer.

Too well-made and well-acted to be entirely cute -- but the result is fairly tepid in comparison to the overheated highlights of Burton's career.

Though serious, well-crafted and handsome, lacks most of the pungency of the epitome of the genre, "Lawrence of Arabia."

Warmhearted lesson in tolerance.

It's a fresh-hearted film that only frustrates when you sense how close it is to being exceptional.

It is a pure, streamlined delight, the advent of a talent with no exact equal in modern film.

It's a film for those people -- and they are legion -- who recoil in horror from the very notion of Christmas cheer. If you're in that crowd, and you know who you are, you'll love it.

Does nothing right and, blessedly, vanishes swiftly like the aroma of a nasty belch.

Compare it with the book, and it stinks. Look at the film on its own, and it still stinks.

The highlights of The Cooler -- the portrait of Bernie-as-schlub, the ecstatic union of two losers, the depiction of shadowy old Vegas confronted with its sanitized corporate future -- are superb. You can easily live with the rest to get to them.

While a splendidly acted and worthily grown-up movie, too often has the feel of a potboiling soap opera, with twists and turns that range from the grimly ironic to the absurdly sensational.

Myers' Cat, with a voice that crosses Bert Lahr's Cowardly Lion with Mel Blanc's Bugs Bunny, is generally fun, possessed of an anarchic playfulness that balances his sometimes bawdy tendencies.

Kassovitz can't control the ridiculous script and messy tone. And though it's not exactly hard to watch Berry run around in a hospital robe (Cruz and Berry: That's one good-looking mental ward), it's not particularly profound.

The combination of ideas and wit, lively characterizations, believable human dilemmas and a climax that both melts and braces you makes for a fine blend. A movie about ideas may sound like a drag, but this one packages them in well-earned emotions.

Judging by the beautiful photography of Salvatore Totino, Howard knows what a Western should look like. But the thrills suggested by the trailers, in which the picture is presented almost like a frightening supernatural horror story, are nowhere to be seen.

It's a wonderfully crafted work, handsome, lively, stirring and utterly convincing in its depiction of the perils and thrills of sea life. But I'm not sure that my personal enthusiasm for it will translate entirely for viewers whose favorite movie about the high seas is, for perfectly good reasons, "Pirates of the Caribbean."

Has many puff-piece moments to it and barely touches the controversy surrounding Tupac's death or that of rival hip-hop impresario Biggie Smalls. But it's engaging nonetheless.

The most telling moment comes when his mother reveals that, despite all the subterfuge and false promises, she wouldn't have had it any other way.

If you're one of those fussy filmgoers who demands that a movie engage somewhat higher body parts -- the heart, say, and the brain -- you'll find only intermittent comfort and joy in this high-concept, low-wattage film.

Sometimes complicated, sometimes incredibly simple, the film explicates or fawns over the human condition with occasional charm and poignancy but too often it's just cloying.

It's old-fashioned, sometimes accomplished, syrupy and, at its intermittent best, absorbing.

Now The Matrix Revolutions is here, and a verdict is justified. The death penalty seems a little strong, but can we lock this franchise up and forget where we put the key?

A suffocating quality stifles it, a sense that we're watching artistic excellence and important ideas being enacted rather than realized.

Franju conjures images -- sometimes gory, sometimes poetic, sometimes fantastical -- that genuinely haunt: the essence of the cinema distilled.

Hilarious mixture of Greek tragedy and Aaron Spelling soap opera that spews nasty one-liners and winking '60 signifiers like a slot machine that's paying out.

The issues the film raises are truly profound and discomfiting whether you work in the media or just consume it.

Such a staggering, start-to-finish disaster that you don't know how to begin detailing its outrages and failings.

That the film rises above that level to the merely mediocre is an accomplishment of almost heroic proportions.

One of the funniest things in Scary Movie 3 is Pamela Anderson. She makes us laugh. And not just at her (though she's game to poke fun at her image) but with her.

The exquisitely exact photography and sound design represent the highest level of craft of Van Sant's career.

In a way, the film is a kind of experiment: Can you lop off the bulk of a classic work and still have something worth seeing? On this evidence, the answer is, despite the best intentions and some fine work, sadly no.

An intermittently gorgeous and evocative film that's so taken with its trangressively bloody and erotic content, it neglects such fussy niceties as coherent plotting and the creation of characters of middling intelligence, plausible psychology or sympathetic nature.

For those who've seen the original, no surprises will be unearthed other than an altered story (not for the better) and more gore.

There's little that will surprise anyone who's seen or read Grisham's work before, but it plays with slick competence, and there's that killer-diller showdown in the middle as a payoff.

Pieces of April isn't the biggest or best film of the year, but it's touching, witty, smart and well-made. You have to sort through a lot of chaff at the multiplex to find all those qualities in a single movie.

Hardcore genre fans may find some appeal in this warmed-over tale, but most viewers will be squirming in their seats even before the prolonged finale.

The film, bleeding its central character of all shades but black and darkest gray, fails as both biographical chronicle and filmed narrative.

Manages to tell the story in generally taut, credible fashion, rising frequently on the strength of a gallery of fine performances even when the screenwriting becomes ordinary and Schumacher's touch becomes, as so often, crude and obvious.

Doesn't add much to the oft-told story of a boy and his dog, and it never establishes the rules of the dogs-in-space myth it creates, but it is perked up by the gentle intelligence of writer/director John Hoffman.

A work of gentle, continual hilarity that feels far more ordinary than other Coen works and yet has every bit of the originality and exactness that makes the brothers' best films so wonderful.

What we've got is a mixed though certainly entertaining bag.

On face value, The Flower of Evil is pure Chabrol, but it lacks the power he brings to human relations and social classes, where often violent, masochistic themes are explored. But that doesn't mean he's done as an artist.

Funny, dumb, cruel and sick, Girls Will Be Girls is a relentlessly mean picture that will tickle those tired of sweet comedies whether in drag or plainclothes. In short, "Tootsie" it ain't.

Eastwood has crafted one of the most powerful American dramas in years.

Washington makes it fun, which is about the best it could hope for.

Crowd-pleasing, feel-good stuff.

Watching this tender little movie with its teasing humor, its deeply felt performances and its focus on slight moments rather than gigantic sea changes is like hearing a tasteful sonata instead of the usual vulgar symphony that the cinema offers up.

This film disappointingly feels like a sometimes brilliantly acted, often gorgeously filmed re-enactment of the television show "Unsolved Mysteries."

It's the sort of sophomoric exercise that will be appreciated chiefly by viewers already convinced they love it even before they've bought their tickets.

Unfunny and misguided, Duplex deserves a wrecking crew.

It's fun, albeit a little messy, under the frequently punchy direction of Peter Berg.

Does at least come bearing two gifts: the rolling beauty of Tuscany and the understated elegance of actress Diane Lane. The rest of the film is fit fodder for the Oxygen Network.

Overall, Luther does a satisfying job of restoring humanity to a woodcut icon.

Manages to feel both obvious and oblique: You feel the need to watch it twice but wonder if you would actually be up for it. It moves like a breezy techno-thriller but tangles itself with duplicities and metaphors. You get it, and then you don't get it, and then you wonder if you even care.

Cobbled together from other sources without much thought to originality.

Plot, comedy and characterization? It's absolutely anemic.

A slick disappointment -- though there's much unintentional humor to be enjoyed.

Written and edited by Sayles, "Casa" is certainly the artist's baby, but he crams too much into a relatively brief running time. Worse, though it should be longer, we're not especially unhappy that it isn't, for being around these women gets tedious.

The script is inane, and though Ferri has some funny moments, the acting is annoying or hopelessly bland.

Watching a group of kindergartners learning to crack an egg into a bowl is hardly the stuff of drama, and yet watching it, you suspect that something important is happening. And it is.

It's so by-the-numbers and clumsy that it will only appeal to that little sect that's managed to wear out their "Evil Dead," "Friday the 13th," "Halloween" and "Nightmare on Elm Street" DVDs.

Despite a cast of solid actors and a director with one of the most exquisite visual sensibilities in the business, the film is too often flat when we want it to dazzle us.

You ride along with a movie like this with a big, dumb grin on your face and no guilt. Not one of this summer's megabucks movies felt this frisky or fun.

It's a bento box of shifts, feints, hints and small, sharp insights, built around a surprisingly deep core of feeling. And it confirms Coppola as an artist to watch and relish.

Its sense of play, its sleek design and Yuen's spectacular action sequences will make it, I suspect, attractive to palates not accustomed to the spicier or cruder forms of this genre.

So what is the picture saying? With its uneven tone, flat direction (on bad-looking digital video) and varied performances, very little.

Compelling and superbly acted.

Is it a silly movie? At times, yes. Is it creaky and blatant and obvious? Quite often, absolutely. But should you miss it in this splendidly colorful restoration? Not on your life.

Short on both life and laughs.

Engrossing and unusual.

Not that Chan isn't lovable; he is. But he's making it harder to feel warm and fuzzy about him with films like The Medallion. It's OK to age, but Chan needs to broaden his horizons. He is a trained singer. Where's that musical he's always dreamed of making?