Reese Witherspoon, whose production company made Penelope, contributes an inflated cameo that feels forced.

Lily Tomlin gives the movie a boost as Portia's radical feminist mother, who would hate this movie.

During one or two comic set-pieces, you can see the appeal that the Ya-Yas hold for readers. But you can also sense, farther in the distance, the more vital film that might have been.

If you've never seen any anime, set your sights on fun and leave your hard nose for drama and fine dialogue at home.

The film is amped up to insanity in its language (both verbal and cinematic), in its ironic embrace of teen-salvation movie clichés, and in its depiction of a small town as a ghetto hell. But just when you think they've gone too far, the Trost brothers 1) go further and 2) wink.

At the end of Martian Child, we're told the movie is "inspired by actual events." But the movie isn't even fully inspired by David Gerrold's source novel that was inspired by actual events.

A dull, clumsy copy of the original The Blues Brothers, this'll give you the blues, all right. [06 Feb 1998, p.24]

The film is much better as a ticking-clock action picture than as a story of human emotions, be they romantic, altruistic or base. So it's too bad that we have to wait so long for the actual raid to begin. When it does, it's a cracker.

Directed as if it were an after-school special, with listless performances and musical numbers (Mary J. Blige shows up as a platinum-wigged congregant), Black Nativity is as simple and condescending as Hughes' work was complex and demanding.

Night at the Museum ends up being a pretty fun all-ages comedy -- if you can survive its first 20 minutes.

The film is flat and false in the exact same way that director Anne Fletcher's last rom-com, "27 Dresses," was flat and false.

The potential for an interesting story is high. Unfortunately, Miller's autobiographical tale, as told in Blue Like Jazz, squanders this potential by failing to take place in a recognizably real world.

It's too ridiculous, too flatly acted, too action-packed, too, well, fun.

So action-packed from start to finish that the final result is grating rather than thrilling.

Blends its seemingly disparate elements into a coherent film that's entertaining, funny, sad and even a bit uplifting and inspirational.

Noisy, garish, cluttered, simplistic and often dark in content, it nevertheless sings and preens and jokes and tugs at you with such persistent verve that, exhausted, you give in.

The result is an exercise in emoting that features one of the worst Southern accents in recent memory and does about as much to establish the actor's range as "Battlefield Earth."

As pointless suspense exercises go, The Strangers at least gets off to a good start.

There's something quietly but unmistakably angry underneath all the slapstick.

It's one of the few genuinely funny comedies in a dismal movie summer.

It's never subtle or clever, but it's big, loud and clear.

Terrific musical numbers and interesting premise.

Though exploring, among other things, fallibility, homosexuality, injustice and loss, the picture seems afraid to really make any kind of strong statement, whether political or psychological.

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.

The plot is like a sudoku puzzle with all but one square filled in.

Willis appears to have finally grown bored of his own shtick, and Malkovich spends most of the movie looking humiliated.

A witless, listless muck-up that sends you reeling from the theater with thoughts of suicide instead of a chipper grin.

The oddball cast, by the way, includes Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon, who is infinitely more convincing speaking Cantonese than she is in her (presumably native) English.