One is hesitant to praise a movie that takes about an hour to get itself going, but it's important to report that once Out to Sea does get going, it makes you laugh.

It takes more than a few lines of clever dialogue, a hero who reads books, and an actor with British training and lots of dignity to keep a movie from going pretty much by the book.

Like many French movies, in the retelling this one boils down to an unremittingly silly set of characters and situations.

The writer-director has come up with a sumptuous, happy piece of fluff.

In another universe - though it is difficult to imagine which one - Garry Shandling might be sexy.

Just fascinating in an empty, trendy sort of way

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.

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.

It's that predictable sweetness that makes any of this more than just bearable.

Schlesinger, working from a script by Amanda Silver ( "The Hand that Rocks the Cradle" ) and Rick Jaffa (he produced that film), gives the film a zippy pace and a natural momentum as direct as a hot knife negotiating a butter stick. Schlesinger is also still canny at casting.

With more sophisticated writing, one suspects they could really soar: Even here, slowed by clunky, character-establishing lines and an all-devouring plot, they hit more often than they miss.

It's soft-edged fun that loses direction (or, given the scattershot plot, directions).

Leave it to Ron Howard to turn a plaintive Dr. Seuss ditty into a C-grade Tim Burton psychodrama.

You can see Bobby and Peter Farrelly bent over blowing violently into the sails of this toy boat, trying to get it to move.

There's not much mystery here; there's only one outcome that could possibly make dramatic sense. And once you realize that, there's not much to do besides watch some very adept performers chew on their lines.

Set in a vivid two-dimensional African village, the animated fable is jerky, odd but redolent somehow of Saturday morning and the night's sleep before.

Roth, though, is like a sociopathic arsonist, one enthralled with his ability to start little blazes and one who would even call the fire department, but wouldn't stick around to see whether anyone put them out.

Lindsay Lohan, 12-year-old veteran of commercials and television, is a frighteningly poised child who is truly impressive as the long-separated twins.

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."

The punch line isn't that funny.

An enthralling special-effects tour de force with a lover's nook.

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.

While the picture periodically skids into sentimentality and characters lapse into schtick, its good-natured quality and winning cast sustain our sympathy.

His good-natured slob routine compensates for a lot of the film's dead spots, and the picture winds up a modest cut above the usual vehicle tailored for a would-be film star.

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

A supremely silly movie, which means that it has moments of boring idiocy mixed with moments of inspired hilarity.

At times, the movie, which has tedious stretches that blunt its charm, is more like a really good idea than a successfully realized picture. [17 Nov 1989, p.C2]

Demonstrates that sadomasochistic streak in von Trier that equates the raw with the experimental.