The shenanigans have been pared into 84 minutes of transgressive, potty-minded farce, that is often Waters at his most cheerful and most thematically focused.

This flashy aloofness puts it in a league with the John Grisham racism-courtroom movie "A Time to Kill" rather than the more moving - and far superior - Harper Lee one, "To Kill a Mockingbird."

Brady 2 redeems itself with those subplots (and another hilarious RuPaul cameo). But at the center, it feels as hollow as a smile-face cookie jar.

Simply an endurance contest, one almost worth staying the 82 minutes to see who wins.

From Juan Ruiz-Anchia's florid, eruptive photography to the pinpoint editing by Howard E. Smith that enhances it, everyone involved with The Corruptor understands that action is the bottom line - except Chow.

At its savviest, Scream 3 is a cheeky conceptual conceit, cheaply executed for the sake of achieving trilogy status. Instead, it's like a carnival that's been in town a week too long.

What director Charles Russell ("The Mask") and co-writers Walon Green ("RoboCop 2") and Tony Puryear do right is supply the kind of non-stop action and laconic one-liners we live for in Arnold movies.

It's a fun movie - full of laughs and touching moments.

Sublimely ridiculous.

This movie has a first-rate script, and director Joseph Ruben ( "True Believer," "The Stepfather" ) knew exactly what to do with it.

If there is a reason anyone would voluntarily agree to make this movie it probably dwells somewhere in a realm only accessible to the thinking of ambitious actors.

More about having a good time with some interesting people than it is about watching a fine movie.

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

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

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

The action moves along at a good clip, and Apted, who made "Gorillas in the Mist," "Nell," "Coal Miner's Daughter," and the "7-Up" series of documentaries, doesn't allow the plot to bog down in details. But the so-called moral dilemma that Myrick's work poses - kidnapping the homeless and torturing them to death in the name of medical science - is laughable.

This is a movie that is wonderful on the peripherals.

Entertaining but predictable, and too long.

Resistant as I was to the idea of a remake, I have to admit that Pollack has made a movie that stands on its own, without odious comparison, as an entertaining love story, particularly if you've never seen the original.

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.

Collapses under its own contempt.

Fancher's placid, eerily subdued first directorial feature.

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

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.

I'm not sure someone with Shrader's pessimistic outlook ought to be making comedies. I think the strain is too much for him.

Parents should note the PG rating. There's little bloodshed, but several fight scenes, lots of loud roaring and some overwhelming special effects sequences could vex younger viewers.

Lou Holtz Jr.'s script is a clever, half-serious indictment of television.

Somehow, although this film's unevenness tends to take us out of the action now and then, there's something kind of agreeable about it. Aiello is extremely funny and so, in his creepy way, is Spader.

But then, just when it appears the race is lost, Steve James' love for his character and art form kicks in and wins the day, and, though flawed, Prefontaine is an engrossing portrait of a complex figure.

During this movie, every few moments the theater fills with the appreciative guffaws of 18-year-old young men. How old are you?

Harris, Heche make unholy twosome.

It took four people to write the screenplay for The Relic. All I can say is that I hope these people have not quit their day jobs.

Becky Johnston ( "The Prince of Tides" ) did creditable work on the screenplay, but there are times when this story about a truly rotten fellow seems to be one big jump cut.

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.

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.

Handsome, well-acted, well-written and beautifully directed movie.

Neeson simply has no spark here. He is good and honest and honorable until your face turns blue. He's just no fun.

What a cast! What a waste!

When Party Girl isn't being silly, it tries to be endearing and socially redeeming, and to a good degree succeeds.

The jokes run hot, cold and tepid.

Some delightful surprises, but the sort of heavy-metal, high-definition sci-fi look that dominates the proceedings, plus the relentless pace and endless morphing, are somewhat tiring.

Slightly more mature and better assembled, Road Trip goes one better on "American Pie" by teasing out the idiosyncrasies in four guys existing in a personality grab bag.

A big, silly movie about the famed goatish painter that stars the nearly perfect Anthony Hopkins.

City of Angels will probably work better for some people than it did for a crusty fellow like me. I feel guilty that I don't like this movie more. I think the devil got the better of me.

Still, Singleton's willingness to take risks makes this a worthy, thoughtful film. Especially noteworthy: His sensitive handling of a love triangle between Kristen and her boyfriend and Kristen and another woman.

Congratulations to director Mick Jackson and writers Jerome Armstrong and Billy Ray for liberating themselves from the tedious demands of believability.

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.

Unsalvageable B-movie junk.

In the case of Jon Robin Baitz's script, adapted from his play, in spite of the fact that he made considerable alterations in the text to open it up to cinematic possibilities, the movie disappoints in much the same way the play did.

This is not the addictive, hot-wired movie you want.

The author calls the movie "perfect" - reassurance that the director hasn't tried to pull any fast ones.

Except for the casting, it would be difficult to find any substantial difference between this movie and the previous ones, or this movie and any number of high-tech adventure movies of the last decade.

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.

With a distractingly cute Quinn, a cartoonishly stern Giannini and woozily romantic Reeves and Sanchez-Gijon, this movie is overflowing with ditsy good will. But it just won't be everyone's cup of Chardonnay.

Crammed with such earnest belief in the power of love - even if it happens in the Chicago Zoo - it almost doesn't matter that O'Connor and Loggia have better chemistry than Duchovny and Driver.

Feels like it could go blow up at any time. It implodes instead, and the meltdown, though visible in one of the final sequences, is still corrosive.

The standard noir trappings are here: the femme fatale, double-crossing, fatalism, broken dreams, innocence betrayed and the rest of it. But Stone pushes it all so far and so relentlessly that it becomes absurdist comedy.

Copycat is as steady and reliable as a pulse and as exhilarating as a surge of adrenalin.

Director Joel Schumacher and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman seem incapable of emphasizing what's important and relegating the rest to secondary status.

Lane, with his extensive stage experience, is acerbic, profoundly cynical and endlessly disgruntled. As the foil, Evans strike the right comic nice-guy note; he has fun with the character's sweetness and refuses to degrade him.

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.

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

In spite of how hard everything is to believe, you believe what Damon is doing.

Sad but still bouncy.

Cronenberg has said that he made the film to find out why he was making it. You may watch it for the same reason.

Crime-by numbers-cop drama.

Multiplicity satisfies the need for a dumb summer comedy while remaining fairly smart.

Poking fun at such hit films as Boyz N the Hood, Menace II Society and Poetic Justice, the Wayanses parody the neo-blaxploitation craze so savagely that no filmmaker will ever be able to make another film about the drugs, guns and ho's of South Central L.A. without figuring out how to work around the genre's well-worn conventions.

Cher is an inspired bit of casting, while the talented Dench is underused. Smith seems to be going through the motions as the fatuous and deluded aristocrat, while Tomlin has a ball as Georgie. But what really stays with you is the work by Plowright - she is a beacon of good sense (both as actor and character) and plucky as you please.

The particulars of the plot don't make a great deal of sense, but Hartley's films have much more to do with style, or rather a philosophical refusal to show emotional involvement.

The Phantom is a spiritless affair likely to vanish quickly from first-run screens.

Giving especially good performances are Aniston, Mahoney, McGlone and Burns. Not that this movie is bad; it's just not as great as "McMullen."

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

It just doesn't work.

Metroland is a provocative rumination on how relationships are warped by two people's inability to be truthful with each other.

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

So phenomenal that Bill Murray can't even steal it. And he tries. So excellent that Murray's MTV progeny Tom Green can't sink it.

What's pleasing about this movie is its enduring adherence to the Bondian ideal.

Eastwood is perfect as the bad guy (a thief) you root for.

Exists as a seldom represented American time capsule, and it's all good.

Director Simon West makes an impressive feature debut in this relentless action-comedy that is, more than anything else, about how funny it is to see hundreds of people exploded, shot, knifed, propellered and burnt to death, and how to land a plane on the crowded Vegas strip.

To enumerate exactly how Bean messes up would be to expose the silliness of this movie, and since Bean's humor is terribly silly, rather, wonderfully silly, there isn't much point in going into detail.

Really just a lurid potboiler.

An army of rolled abs and their owners give the state of American race relations a beginner's workout.

Aiming to keep it real, the cast of the new dance casserole Center Stage sweats spunk.

Unfortunately, the contemporary horror movie has ceased being an individual work full of surprises and fresh manifestations of the Gothic imagination - it has, instead, been reduced to the level of an inflexible, repetitious, ritualistic event.

Nicholson squeezes every wretched drop of buffoonery from this character, and it's distressing to watch him play an easy role for easy laughs.

This is a prodigious something. It's just difficult to say whether that something is good or evil.

This sequel is much better than the original "Under Siege"...The real coup here is the discovery that when you eliminate dialogue, and thus eliminate Seagal's efforts to act in that rather high voice of his, the movie takes on a surprising gravity. When Seagal doesn't talk, he verges on the dignified. It's kind of scary.

Jingoistic politics are not proper or prudent in the pluralistic human society of the 1990s. It's much easier to assuage these baser urges by facing a real nonhuman enemy that just wants to kill you. War is gore. You or them. That message is the real strength of "Starship Troopers," although many may find it morally flawed. No matter, this is powerful entertainment that appeals to our most basic instincts.

The moment this movie began to go wrong, so wrong, was when the word "angels" started working its way into the script, coming out of the mouths of people we are supposed to respect and look to for hope.

A football epic on performance enhancers that may be more flagrantly flawed, more shockingly predictable and just plain cornier than its rickety predecessors.

Ineptly written and shot like a fashion mag, rings hollow throughout. It's a long, long way from "Jules and Jim."

Unfortunately, all the good parts didn't add up to a great movie.

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.

The movie's coda is completely ridiculous and, worse yet, boring.

The Frighteners is a gooey pastiche of Casper, Ghost, Poltergeist, Back to the Future (it's produced by Future director Robert Zemeckis), Ghostbusters, and episodes of Columbo.

The movie is, more than anything else, great fun to watch. The sets and costumes are stunning. The women are beautiful. The men are dashing. What's not to like?