Sympathizing with Moreau would be difficult in any case. But with Brando in the role, there is the added obstacle of needing to suppress laughter every time he opens his pursed mouth.

Most of the time the audience is two steps ahead of the characters.

I suppose Kusturica can justify the 167-minute length by the historical breadth of the movie, but it simply doesn't sustain one's interest, significant or not.

Demon Knight may be a good career move by director Ernest Dickerson ( "Juice" ), proving that he can work with a reasonably large budget on a genre film. But the picture breaks no ground, and in terms of his own development, it's hardly a step forward.

Here and there, a good idea or scene erupts, as when the antagonists accidentally switch cellular telephones and start taking each other's emergency calls. And Jack keeps his shrink appointment but must speak in code so his daughter won't understand. But these are anomalies and subside just as suddenly as they appear.

Between fights, the film can't even rely on the luxury of Lindo, Isaiah Washington, Russell Wong, Rottweiler rapper DMX or the scary Henry O as Han's father to make it watchable - the dialogue is wreaking more havoc than Li.

Not even his gap-toothed charm and willingness to make fun of his usual take-no-prisoners persona made it easier to swallow the mess of pottage that is Jingle All the Way.

Most of these scenes are long, boring shots of the men aiming their rifles nervously into the mist. Truth may be stranger than fiction, but fiction is more artfully arranged.

The movie is an ill-advised work of egomania by someone who clearly has some talent, but not as much as he seems to think.

Once you've embraced a show for its stupidity, you might as well go all the way and applaud its dullness, triviality and bad taste.

SORRY, SALLY. I didn't like it. I really didn't like it.

No amount of excellent period costuming and brilliant set decoration can substitute for a good story and decent acting.

It has the distinctive look of a Walter Hill picture, but in the end boils down to little more than a Bruce Willis action vehicle.

Spoof both of P.I.s and independent filmmakers is languidly paced and not very funny.

Big swirls of computer-generated dirt, a bickering couple and the dead certainty that the fiancee will leave and the bickerers will get back together. An exciting night out, or what?

Two points save "Lousy 2" from the absolute abyss. One is a couple of imaginative touches in the art design: Cori drives an old Citroen, and a couple of Vespa-like motor scooters are briefly glanced. The other is the performance of Frewer, who played the lead in TV's "Max Headroom." He endows the character with more sardonic humor than we have a right to expect from the junky script by TV-oriented director Farhad Mann.

Hytner uses 360-degree camera turns and strange angle shots to inject this largely lifeless business with some drama. Ryder tries to do the same by nearly working herself into cardiac arrest in several monologues. Day-Lewis is acting so hard you can see his lower teeth, which, by the way are sometimes horribly decayed and other times white enough to blind a dental hygienist...See this movie at the peril of your soul.

Unfortunately, it stars Keanu Reeves and Cameron Diaz, so it has, more than anything else, a sense of ridiculousness.

Brainless thriller.

A loathsome, quite unterrifying and mercifully brief entry in the ongoing series about that homicidal doll, is the best argument I could cite for planned puppethood.

In tackling 1000 A.D., (McTiernan)'s suddenly an unwieldy, clunky filmmaker.

If the idea is to teach us something about the 37th president of the United States, then you would think Stone would resolve to stick to what can be proven about the man's life, or at least indicate when he's speculating. But Stone is the Great Explainer, and facts have an annoying habit of mucking up his explanations.

Despite heroic efforts of four promising young actresses in the starring roles and a nifty premise, the movie is a mess: so incoherently plotted that dramatic tension doesn't have a chance to build.

The title is exactly the sort of juvenile joke the entire movie leans on.

The intention is there, but the needed emotional maturity isn't.

The jokes run hot, cold and tepid.

A hokey summer entertainment that is full of big machinery, satellite dishes du jour, long embarrassing close-ups and gaps in logic through which large UFOs could hurtle. No need to go into that here. Anyone who might enjoy The Arrival would be impatient with logic.

What a cast! What a waste!