Besides some fine dogfight sequences, it often feels threadbare, just an exercise in recycling.

If I wanted a Nora Ephron cuddle-ganza, I'd rent one.

Modestly better than last year's awful "End of Days," though it falls well short of Arnold's "Terminator" peak period.

Little Nicky is but a meek gross-out cousin of "The Waterboy."

Good-looking and empty.

It's hard not to like a movie like Men of Honor, but it's entirely possible.

There's more gymnastic yammering in Loving Jezebel than in a season of "Dawson's Creek."

Feels like an interminable pilot for a show to fill that deadly 8:30 slot between "Friends" and "Will and Grace."

There's the world-alteringly scary possibility that (Leder) might be trying to kill us with a star-studded "After School Special."

A weakly performed rehash of master-slave role-reversal tales.

It seems like another misstep - the story just doesn't hold up to Ritchie's treatment.

Not the sweaty midnight stroll through the garden of carnal delights that its title wants you to believe.

Too much of nothing and far from the potentially star-making material that Foxx deserves.

A misfire.

Capably made but simplistic story.

Timely in that it joins an already mammoth list of bad movies about post-hippie static, including the recent "Steal This Movie."

An impressive low-whistle, hardscrabble look at the world of pool sharks and the people who crisscross their lives.

Tired comedy.

It's often a lapsed, under-informed documentary with restagings.

Fails to be the histrionic bubble bath that you want to carry you away.

Determined to be inoffensively tidy and cute above all else.

Not entirely persuasive, not entirely schmaltzy, "The Tic Code" is one of those well-meant dramatizations... that mysteriously made it all the way to a theater near you.

Doesn't have what it takes to be truly terrible.

Determined to try your patience, asking you to fall in love with it.

An archaic rail-ride into the heart of boredom.

An arthritic failure, genuine only when the two outcast lovers' eyes dart toward each other, then retreat.

Particularly anticlimactic - the film itself seems sprung from molting yuppie catalogs.

The Patriot makes the Revolutionary War look like super-produced studio footage of the L.A. riots.

With a few quiet, moving scenes and a lovely ending, the film betrays an artist's touch, no matter how hard Kitano tries to make it look easy.

Frill-less almost to the point of minimalist, teary without being lachrymose, hers is a performance you'd think was great were the movie in a language you didn't understand.

Earnest and kid-friendly -- also simplistic and dramatically creaky.

Works as a quixotic study of emotional quirks.

Like sitting on the beach under a cozy, warm afternoon sun. The view is beautiful, but not much is happening and soon you drift peacefully to sleep.

Needs a gritty intervention.

If you haven't taken your mother to a movie in a while, this is the ticket, with its PG-13 rating, lack of violence and like that.

A lazy, torpid piece of animated tourism.

Whatever It Takes is DOA -- dated on arrival.

Right up to its deliberate thud of a closer, Polanski had me.

The best and worst of old school -- retro but stale. Frankenheimer, along with Ben Affleck, donates what cool there is.

Generates very little heat.

Blakeney can't decide if this is a quirky romantic comedy or a quirky mob essay, and you can see the movie thinking itself into a rhythmless hole with cement shoes.

Latest Freddie Prinze Jr. vehicle stalls at on-ramp.

What remains is Washington's volcanic and contemplative work at the core of a film packed to the rafters with raging bull.

As cosmetically sanitized revisions of history go: This is as good as it gets.

Reinforcing the chasm between movie magic and wishful thinking.

A shameless "Shawshank" redux.

For all the blathering, heavy-handed pathos, we might as well be watching the Lifetime cable channel.

The World Is Not Enough, like a 19th version of anything, is inanely self-parodic. So much so that one wonders why Austin Powers need have bothered in the first place.

By casting model-turned-actress (and his now-estranged wife) Milla Jovovich as the Maid of Orleans, Besson gives us an over-amped spectacle with an annoying, sometimes ridiculous cipher at its heart.

A laughably disconnected hostage drama that rails against the perceived nightmare of inner-city public schools.

This is neither a psychological thriller nor an erotic one, so any interest in the story is purely the work of its stars.

What mystifies, too, is the complete absence of information about Salerno-Sonnenberg's private life.

As innocuous as the love songs on its soundtrack.

It's scant to the point of irrelevance.

Not as predictable as the rest of its ilk.

The story of a trainer and three of his boxers trying to break away from the confines of a gym in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Each story is strong, gripping in its own way. But you've heard them all before.

Often grating in its presentation.

More altruistic would be if Williams stopped torturing us with weepy endearments so he could look for that complex clown who used to mug just for laughs.

Implausibly dainty.

An au natural (read: graphic) tryst-a-thon whose fashion sense is outweighed only by its bulky sexual intellectualism.

A piece of baseball fluff...Costner cinema, pure and simple.

The comedian's thankful willingness to do anything for Blue Streak...is its redeeming grace.

The needle on the laugh-o-meter barely budges.

Crime-by numbers-cop drama.

As insulting as taking the queen to the Olive Garden.

Its finest moments come in sequences such as Alice and Darlene's prison break and the girls' final wrenching plea for freedom.

It feels like a trumped up trifle, disinterested in narrative exercises, using instead technique (cinematography, editing and, omigod, a soundtrack!) to swing moods and heighten reality, then send it crashing to earth.

De Bont's effects-riddled remake of the '63 spook-out adaptation of Shirley Jackson's novel is not nearly as creepy as either its cinematic or its literary precedents. But it's a hokey, hokey entertainment and a $100 million Lili Taylor movie.

It also goes out of its way to give you a schlocky B-movie vibe by wrangling bait in the form of a bunch of Big-Gulp stupid stock characters - that's a whopping 44 oz. more stupid than you probably were bargaining for.

A movie that sports more cameos than a "HeeHaw" marathon but not much else.

A limp excuse for a coming-of-age flick, more interested in sexploits than sex, more adept at gross-out than girls.

These pictures need a light touch and a lot of attitude, but this time you can hear heavy breathing in the background.

In a sense, Sandler is damned if he develops, damned if he devolves. But he needn't apologize for being who he is by turning a goldmine sitcom into a tame "Baby Boom" for guys.

Leans so heavily on its stars that their performances are marred by their emptiness.

No-one's-home acting by Bierko and Mol doesn't help, while the talented D'Onofrio ("The End of the World") and Mueller-Stahl (a veteran of European pictures) are better than the material.

The absence of substance, or its banishment, and the director's reliance on allure (in the film's casting and in its look and sound, which features haunting music by Beethoven and Chopin), leave Innocence with the quasi-profound, giggly overreach of a magazine layout come to shameless, shallow life.

A frantic, epic-sized blowout of campy, "Indiana Jones" -style derring-do mixed with lots of computer-generated gee-whizzes.

If it's difficult to find straight laughs in a colorblind prison movie (It's difficult enough to find a colorblind prison movie), finding straight laughs in a black one is almost impossible.

Competent, to be sure, with some good lines.

The movie's afraid of [Stiles], turning Kat from riot grrrrl to Solid Gold dancer in the time it takes to drop one Notorious B.I.G. song at that house party - which is why it's the Spam of processed teen movies.

Though short on subtlety, A Walk on the Moon does offer the consolation of some decent performances.

The laserdisc of media movies - it plays fine, but it's clunky and cumbersome.

An arcade game disguised as a love story, nearly comatose with cute.

Plays like a lost Rockford file.

This is the kind of movie that mistakes heartbreak for being housebroken.

It's fun, but the blatant, obvious kind that mistakes allusive cool for mature filmmaking and subtle ideasmanship.

A movie that barely lives.

A gooey-sweet, beautifully photographed romantic fantasy…It's also -- at the risk of sounding like a Grinch -- a mess.

It's a movie drenched in narcissism and wish-fulfillment, almost a textbook on how to make a formulaic, romantic film.

The Faculty deserves a week of detention, not so much for missing the point as for blunting it.

Could have been maudlin from start to finish. Instead, more than half the 154-minute film is riveting - filled with funny, touching bits that don't stoop to cheap sentimentality.

The spectacle is huge; the animation, breathtaking. In many ways, it is the epic of biblical proportions the filmmakers hoped for. But, like the Good Book itself, The Prince of Egypt can also be tedious, self-important and at times exhausting.

Director Troy Miller, making his feature debut, does a decent job with schmaltzy material.

This is middling Woody, at best: For every funny line or sequence, there's at least one misfire.

You feel the full weight of the movie's three hours, since the filmmakers only had 90 minutes' of plot.

At some point, the movie itself crosses the line, from a modestly thoughtful attempt to extrapolate a drama from real and urgent events to a generic action piece with predictable good and bad guys and pat, civics-book morals.

On the one hand, you want to praise it for its stylishness and originality in tackling some fascinating subject matter. On the other hand, it's frustrating because it could have been so much better.

It fails to capitalize on its own gifts, coming darn close to greatness but never quite catching the brass ring.