See "Freaky Friday" for convincing cross-generational female bonding. Despite it's elegant style and uptown milieu, this film is a cheap imitation.

If there is a delicate story of forgiveness, friendship and family buried somewhere in Erica Beeney's script, Potelle and Rankin haven't managed to find it under the throes of empty rebellion and painless triumph.

The psychobabble silliness passed off as investigative insight here is laughable at best.

If you find her (Ryan) distinctive persona to be too irritatingly cute to bear, this mannered movie is likely to play like fingernails on a blackboard .

Gets entertaining when Liu kicks in.

Surreal, vaguely amusing, European-made drama.

As weak a star vehicle as Hollywood has cranked out this millennium.

The formulaic screenplay has enough funny moments to keep the audience from concentrating on the predictability of it all.

An action buddy comedy is such an offbeat and inspired notion that it's impossible not to think of it without smiling.

The bright spot is Seann William Scott ("Dude, Where's My Car?") as Bo Duke. His good-naturedly maniacal manner and early Dennis Quaid killer smile are endearing, to the point where he occasionally threatens to elevate the movie into something special.

But a movie is only as good as its script, and this one is labored, predictable, sexually unimaginative (despite its salacious poster, and Eszterhas' reputation), surprisingly abrupt (only 90 minutes) and strangely inconclusive. [13 Oct 1995]

Far from a great movie, it nonetheless does its job as a family adventure and saga of a woman's personal growth.

Only Carol Kane, hilarious in roller curls and wide tortoiseshell glasses, gets to sink her teeth into her role. At least for Lohan, "Confessions" is her stepping-off point. Now she has to find a film to be her "real" stage.

Fun-enough teenage adventure suitable for the whole family.

Has moments of inspiration, but the scattershot spoofing never achieves enough momentum to get this flight airborne.

Empowers its 14-year-olds and comes through with a Cinderella story sure to charm every girl who isn't part of the cool clique.

Carl Reiner's Fatal Instinct is about as awful a movie parody as you'd ever want to see, but the guy certainly deserves some points for persistence. [29 Oct 1993]

It's hard to imagine how anyone could sit through this thing except squirming critics and violence addicts in need of a particularly gruesome fix.

Good performances are mostly wasted. Phoef Sutton's adaptation of the Abrahams' novel is poor, it works to an absurdly unlikely and dramatically dishonest must-hit-a-home-run conclusion, and - though it tries here and there - it has absolutely nothing new to say on the subject of fan obsession. [16 Aug 1996. p.30]

Kilner's light touch keeps the romantic pair dancing around their romance without tripping, but as the film reaches the inevitable happy ending, the steps look all too familiar.

The resulting hodgepodge has the feel of filmmaking by committee, the look of last-minute reshoots and the whiff of desperation. Not even Braff's cartoonish smirk is distracting enough to hide that.

You walk away wishing they had more than this scant and often shoddy material with which to enjoy their rollicking and racy good time.

By the time a member of teen-movie royalty makes a cameo in the film's finale, Not Another Teen Movie has long exhausted any hope of succeeding. Instead it becomes, well, just another teen movie.

Backseat satisfies itself with small observations and minor breakthroughs of self-awareness. In the scheme of their lives, this journey is just a speed bump, jolting them awake for a brief moment. The rest is up to them.

In this movie, he (Shelton) falls so hard he becomes, for the first time in his career, genuinely offensive.

Rock, who seems to have studied every nuance of Beatty's Oscar-nominated comic performance -- is surprisingly appealing in what is often a straight role.

A strange and convoluted film that is as rewarding as a Dylan song, and just as perplexing.

Try as it might, this glossy action adventure isn't nearly as clever as the "Spy Kids" franchise.

Its heart is in the right place, and it doesn't flinch an iota from its duty of rubbing our faces in the horror of the Third World over the past two decades.

A slick, cynical, nasty piece of heist-film plotting that hides its more obvious logical gaps in techno-babble and distracting spectacles of wanton violence and big explosions.

When the film suddenly turns into "Rocky" -- as all boxing films of the past two decades invariably do -- it invalidates its theme.

This is still Reiner's worst movie since 1994's "North." Wilson is lackluster, the film's depiction of the collaborative process is (unlike "Adaptation") tortuously false, and it's so disrespectful to the realities of writing and publishing that it has no satiric bite.

Either you're in the mood for a sweet and simple Christmas movie or you're not. If you are, then Perfect Holiday should fit the bill nicely.

Not faithful enough to be an adaptation, too misguided to be considered an interpretation, and not funny enough to be a parody, this film would do well not to advertise its inspiration.

So witless, sit-com shallow and bad in every way that it's just not worthy of much discussion.

A genuinely creepy film, though not in a "No Country for Old Men" kind of way. More in an overzealous-blog-comments kind of way, or a dude-on-the-bus-looking-at-me kind of way. Just ugh.

Isn't merely bad, it's utterly flavorless and the filmmakers are either too lazy or too cynical to even pretend there's a story behind Lawrence's 21st century homeboy shtick in 14th-century garb.

It's getting hard not to think of De Niro as anything but a dead-pan comedian.

A dumb film with a great conceptual hook from a director who visualizes better than he dramatizes.

This harmless but mediocre enterprise was doomed to failure from the start. Hollywood magic can do a lot, but it can't raise the dead.

Resnick's script never engages, the stars can't find the keys to their broadly played characters, and Ephron's direction is harrowingly out of sync.

Cliched, mostly routine and never especially satisfying.

Some of it works, most of it doesn't. But the real problem of the movie is that it's so utterly lacking in freshness and originality. This is exactly the kind of formulaic indie gay comedy that was so overdone in the '80s and '90s that it became a film festival cliché.

Entertaining in a trashy sort of way.

It's phony and forced, but mostly it's just silly. If there was once a satirical edge to this thriller, it's been programmed right out.

Whether or not Garden Party is an accurate portrait of the shadow L.A. culture where the young, pretty and desperate can find quick rent money, this low-budget production never engages with its characters or stories enough to make you care either way.

It is not just that this action-comedy is a totally stupid, by-the-numbers collection of every action movie cliche ever coined. It is that the thing is so upsettingly mean-spirited and incorrigibly ugly, a movie that absolutely revels in sadism and constantly asks us to laugh at the most sordid and explicit acts of violence. [17 Mar 1990]

Stiller and Black have the chemistry of fingernails-on-blackboard and the movie is disastrously unfunny.

It's incorrigibly unfunny.

Manages to squeeze by on Angelina Jolie's surprising flair for self-deprecating comedy.

Though First Daughter delivers a nice twist about midway through and Keaton lights up the screen every time he's on it, Holmes fails to deliver the kind of nuanced performance "Pieces of April" suggests she's capable of.

The film's first-time director, the TV-commercial-trained Marcel Langenegger, is out to emulate Hitchcock with dashes of "Vertigo," "Strangers on a Train" and more. But his homage is uninspired and disconnected, and his film is a bore.

An innocuous waste-of-time.

It's only a notch above the routine, and it obeys all the conventions of its tired formula, but it also tones the anarchy with a serious edge and it works a surprisingly effective vein of race-relations satire.

The sad truth is that it's dreadful, despite a top cast and strong production values. [02 Dec 1994]

Anyone in the market for an overblown and totally mindless adventure-comedy will certainly get his money's worth.

The movie depends on one of those big surprise endings for its effectiveness, but the script gives itself away in the first act.

Ever wondered what the bastard stepchild of "Rear Window" and "Harry and the Hendersons" would look like? Probably not. Nevertheless, here it is in the form of a Bigfoot horror flick gone horribly awry.

The utter lack of tension or suspense is as dumbfounding as Hunt's blender approach to editing, which purees action scenes into incoherent mashes of image confetti.

There is no stylistic thrill to this blunt object of a callous action film. It's content to bludgeon the audience into numb resignation.

The result is a great-looking movie with an awkward balance of pulp noir and campy self-awareness.

A stiff of a supernatural comedy.

Lacks the driving unity that gave "Gettysburg" its focus, dramatic arc, climax and catharsis.

One more bloated effects-o-rama lumbering through a formula plot (super-villain out to rule the world) without much zest, imagination or awareness of its own absurdity.

Ultimately this soppy Pacifier sucks.

Is Queen of the Damned worthy of its hype or should it have a stake driven through its dark heart? The answer lies somewhere in between.

Don't watch this film unless you have a high tolerance and an undemanding appreciation for penis jokes and humor based more on a capacity to disgust than to surprise.

A not-bad ghost story that marks a comeback of sorts for its star, Michael Keaton, who hasn't top-billed a movie for almost a decade.

Washington's fire and righteous anger can only do so much, and the token grit amounts to a few grains of sand in the sentimental machinery.

An insufferably insipid comedy with a cruel subtext.

Director Casey La Scala directs with enough energy to carry the odyssey over the next ramp, but for all the eagerness of the performances, the conviction is strictly prepackaged.

Ashton Kutcher wants to be taken seriously so badly it hurts. So does this metaphysical mess of a movie, a pseudo time-travel drama so complicated it takes more than half an hour just to establish the gimmick. And a gimmick it is.

Deutch never raises the film beyond its paint-by-numbers blueprint.

This ill-fitting Tuxedo is strictly off-the-rack.

In no way is this a serious movie. Still, it's hard to resist.

For those whose idea of hilarity is an adult and a kid throwing fireworks at each other, then getting stoned and playing piggyback in the mall, this movie should be a refreshing tonic.

What is this movie about? Is it a morality tale? Is it about the complexity of romantic love? Parenthood? Accepting the often-blurred lines of our sexual orientation? Is it about the role of race in white-collar crime? What?

First-time director Steve Beck hurls a dozen ghosts and probably a million dollars' worth of prosthetic makeup at us for a full 90 minutes, but it's old hat and not a bit scary.

Plays like a series of well-done but disconnected acting-class sketches, filled with a huge cast of first-rate actors whose careers have all gone into decline.

Yet another raunchy, gross-out farce, this one about smart-alecky city boys who have wacky adventures while exposing themselves in -- I mean to -- the great outdoors.

This is a much dumber movie than "The Lake House." In fact, the script is an ungainly mess and ultimately a shaggy-dog story.

A comedy that surpasses stupidity, and not in entertaining ways.

The movie has a suspenseful moment or two, and it's never hard to watch, but it's ultimately one more totally forgettable Hollywood thriller.

Tired and glib, it tries to milk humor from the sniping, sass and simple disrespect of its unpleasant traveling companions.

Garity, son of Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden, gives the kind of performance rarely seen in today's movies.

It resorts to a story line so predictable that its willingness to go so earnestly into unoriginal territory is doubly disappointing since its first half had so much more going for it.

A resounding dud.

Between Stallone's soap opera of a script and Renny Harlin's speed-obsessed visuals, we're never really shown much more than fast cars and obsessed drivers.

A perfect example of form without content.

Undiscovered promotes one of the stupidest visions of the entertainment industry since "American Idol" opened the celebrity gateway to the dregs of the karaoke generation.

Unfortunately, this low-lowbrow comedy, which tries to pass itself off as a "Friday" crossed with "Legally Blonde," also does nothing to distinguish itself from recent urban flops "The Wash" and "Pootie Tang."

Prinze and Forlani coast on charisma alone, but even their charms can't coax magic from the prosaic dialogue and romantic clichés that clog this listless comedy.

It's a tedious experience in almost every way: The acting is numbingly one-note, the CGI work is unconvincing and often downright shoddy, and the action is poorly staged and framed so close you can never tell for sure who is lopping off whose head.

The script drowns out its ideas with arch melodramatic devices and ridiculous twists while Babbitt smothers even the daylight scenes in an oppressive gloom.

There's a vicious, crude nerve that snakes through this sequel and it leaves no group unscarred -- but unfortunately, women and the handicapped take most of the thrusts.

The script is fatally stupid, most of the gags fall flat, the secondary characters add little, Hudson fails to make anything interesting out of the exasperated heroine, and the endless references to McConaughey's sexual prowess finally become revolting.

The whole affair comes off as thin and artificial as a super model after a botox party.

Like shave ice without the topping, this cinematic snow cone is as innocuous as it is flavorless.