It's a beautiful movie. Too beautiful for its own good, really.

By the time you get to the end of the movie and our heroes and Regis' cop buddy Dennis Miller must sprint through a series of tunnels beneath the White House racing against evil to save the presidency, if your credulity hasn't been tested you'll probably find your heart racing pleasantly.

Ultimately, The Doom Generation succeeds on its old-fashioned virtues - cinematography, acting, script, storytelling, individual vision. Plenty of films have dealt with teen isolation and many more will pile on the shocks, but few have a script this hilarious or a visual sensibility this developed.

The best way to characterize "The Blues Brothers 2000" is as a fabulous concert film with incredibly bad patter between the songs. If you ignore the silly plot that links the extravaganzas together, you'll have a great time.

The only remarkable feature about this otherwise routine movie is that it vilifies two current icons of American life. One is The Internet and the other is The Mall.

Neither offensive nor inspired.

Bilko and his gang are far less concerned with valve jobs and retreads than with greyhound racing, off-track betting, numbers, poker and pool, and most of the movie's gags reflect this limited premise.

Now and then the script reaches admirable heights of humor.

It's not easy to wrench belly laughs out of contract killing, but Nine Yards does just that.

A crafty, sometimes craven, but hardly worshipful snapshot of an unlikely candidate for biggest rock act on earth.

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

It succeeds because of the frenzied, kinetic direction by Mike Newell, one of the most interesting big-hit directors.

As entertaining, charming and conceited as other Robert Redford joints, but it's also insufferably obvious.

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

This is the sort of movie that doesn't become irritating even when it's predictable.

If only it wasn't such bloody nonsense.

Speaking of bangs, the special effects include one of the better mega-blasts in recent memory: vast fireballs tear through the busy tunnel at dizzying speed and with devastating results. This is the money shot, what the Stallone audience is paying for. It remains to be seen if they'll buy a Stallone who's been downsized and reformulated - about a teaspoon's worth of added complexity.

The cast and crew and screenwriters seem to have had some fun with it, and the audience, coming along for the ride, has some fun with it, too.

Ideological disaster!

A slick, supercharged popcorn flick of the erstwhile Bruckheimer-Simpson brigade in which the only thing more shameful than the proceedings is a very well-paid male star assigned to make you less aware of that sucking sound.

I like that Sheridan's girlfriend works at Starbucks. Snipes plays the part with the kind of high energy that large doses of caffeine would explain.

William H. Macy is fine as the detective Arbogast, wearing a hat he could have borrowed from Martin Balsam in the original role.

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

So it's hard to know who gets the blame for Payback. I say we cut Mel some slack and put the hex on Helgeland.

The talented Murphy is appealing here, performing with sincerity and restraint - a wise choice, since his co-stars are a menagerie of wisecracking animals.

The cast's control and Dobkin's assured pacing keep most of the funny things funny and make most of the scary things scary - while maintaining the tricky balance between humor and fear.

A salacious mess of a film written and directed by rapper Ice Cube.

Tank Girl - a slapdash but lively film based on the underground comic of the same name - takes militant feminism of the "Thelma & Louise" school and weds it to the punk nihilism of the "Mad Max" school. Actually, given Tank Girl's personality - sassy, sexy and gun-savvy - "weds" is probably the wrong verb.