A shameless "Shawshank" redux.

If you buy the gross, it's surprisingly funny .

The jokes run hot, cold and tepid.

The End of the Affair's masterfully heartbroken final scene is scarier in its nightmarishly wry suggestion of ill fate than anything that ever happened on Elm Street.

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

By its hilarious, grotesquely over-the-top climax, Holy Smoke is ideologically, metaphorically out of control, as if it has risen from the '70s ashes.

Woody Allen's questionable toe-tapping faux-documentary.

An alt-country paean to libidinal mothers and the little girls who clean up the mess.

Never has this war been filmed with such ragged glory.

The movie equivalent of the fruitcake you get every year from the folks back home. It's brick-heavy and full of nasty bits you don't want to put in your mouth, lovingly wrapped in pink cellophane.

Aspires to the boundlessness of a kid's imagination.

Flawless is what happens when a filmmaker has no sense of naturalism, no sense of realism and no real natural sense.

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.

There must be nine or 10 thwacks to the neck throughout Sleepy Hollow, and Burton finds a different way to make the resulting severed noggin fall as though you'd forgotten the last one.

Almodovar imbues his Harlequin-novel-meets-Marvel-comic-book melodramas with something more than a wink and a smile, and it's beguiling.

What's on the screen may not be a letter-perfect Mansfield Park, but something true to its spirit.

The only film sequels in history that just keep getting better.

Dogma' is Kevin Smith's fourth film and it looks like his first but I'm not ready to quit him -- there's a landmark in him. I just wish the crafty, raucous Dogma was it.

The success of Felicia's Journey lies in the work of the steady and here understated Hoskins, who gives one of his best performances, and young Cassidy, who displays a weary maturity even through her deer-in-the-headlights character.

A monumentally graceful union of two extremely dissimilar stars, one inspired cinematographer and an exceptionally patient, curious, independent-minded director.

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

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.

Turns into something like a screwball farce, an intimate, self-aware one.

The film is obviously a long-form episode of a show better digested in 22-minute segments.

Painfully unfunny.

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

A shockingly eloquent, nearly moving feat of Y2K-trendiness.