Retains the earlier film's ability to delight the viewer with surprise effects and flights of fancy, only now the effects are better.

Clearly, great fun.

The result is a gutsy little picture and a nice slice of life.

A sweet-natured reconsideration of one of San Francisco's most vital, if least widely recognized, creative fountainheads.

A hit- and-miss affair, consistently amusing but not as outrageous or funny as Cho may have intended or as imaginative as one might have hoped.

It is great summer fun.

Adams sparkles with quick-mindedness and verbal agility. This is a worthy and underused talent.

An amazing film amazingly tasteless, tin-eared and awkward, but amazing all the same. Anyone with a predilection for bad movies might want to see it, if only in an inspecting-the-wreckage spirit, since because movies this misguided come but once or twice a year.

A stink bomb of a movie.

Women had to struggle for years to launch their own basketball league; it's a shame that the first movie to address their success is a drag comedy, and a lousy one at that.

It succeeds, occasionally.

An attempt at an epic. Sayles assembles a big cast and creates a mosaic of interweaving characters and story lines. But the stories are bland, the connections are incidental and the dramatic payoff is nonexistent.

Here's a tiresome feature that could be made into a wonderful 20-minute film -- or, with a few adjustments, into two or three 10-minute shorts.

This is the kind of pure entertainment that, in its fullness and generosity, feels almost classic.

Extraordinary.

The result is a genre-bending yarn, an entertaining mix of period drama and flat-out farce that should please history fans.

Despite some feints in a soulful direction, the picture has none of the interior quality of a multifaceted war film like Terrence Malick's "The Thin Red Line." Woo is all about elegant surfaces, not inner conflicts.

We're left with a metallic aftertaste.

Do you really want to spend money watching what is essentially marginality, or would those dollars be better used to see a better film or even buy a good book?

The result is not only entertaining but also refreshing, a shameless crowd-pleaser with a healthy cynicism about itself.

A touching but odd mix of live action and animation.

It's fast, snappy and entertaining in a superficial way. But it lacks gravity and authenticity and seems more like a product than an attempt to tell a story.

Director Bernard Rose has created a committed, intelligent and fascinating piece of work with no irony about it.

A film of real beauty, which is surprising, since it's not a movie of beautiful sentiments or settings.

Divine cast keeps 'Ya-Ya Sisterhood' from falling flat

It's an endurance test. Though never boring, the movie is a fairly long slog through the snow.

Yet there's no getting around one awkward fact. The picture, which turns on a cataclysmic act of terrorism within U.S. borders, was made for a different audience from the one that's about to see it.

The picture is crammed with shameless satire, engaging moments of pure silliness and jokes that border on the outrageous. It combines relentless energy with an aura of good nature for a formula that works.