A resounding dud.

It was also a miscalculation to make the film so sexually explicit. It doesn't particularly serve the story and, for all his gifts, Macy is just not the kind of actor most people want to see in a whirl of sweaty, naked sex.

A punch in the stomach of a movie. It is as ugly as it is beautiful, as full of peaks as of lows. It's a character-driven movie about people on an emotional edge who are ridding themselves of the things that can no longer work without inflicting damage.

Where "The Cat" book was anarchistic but ultimately sweet-spirited, this movie is ugly, dumb and colossally mean-spirited.

Kassovitz directs with an unrelenting intensity that helps you to suspend disbelief almost all the way to the credits.

Like a family visit during the holidays. Tensions run high, not everyone is likable but being there's an uneasy comfort because everything is so familiar.

The movie also has a supernatural element: the leader of the renegades (Eric Schweig) turns out to be a sorcerer with occult powers. It's very clumsy, and speaks to the pandering streak in Howard that has always prevented him from being a truly first-rate film artist.

The music, art direction and camerawork blend together with an integrity and scope that's wonderfully exhilarating. Every frame seems to communicate the grandeur, power and fatal pull of the sea.

The film is an across-the-board charmer that should appeal to children as well as their parents, aficionados of animation and old-movie buffs who will be challenged to sort out the blur of seemingly hundreds of classic film references.

MTV offers an airbrushed portrait that does nothing but perpetuate the myth of an "angelic" hoodlum.

Its elements all come together with an unforced perfection, every scene feels real and alive in a way that many of his more surrealistic later films do not, and Leonard Maltin, for one, has argued that I Vitelloni is no less than Fellini's masterpiece.

Looks simultaneously ahead of its time and delightfully quaint, a simple romantic comedy that revels in the dreamy artifice of a meticulously re-created fantasy Las Vegas.

The journey comes together to be one of the very best of the "in search of" documentaries: open-minded, informative, immaculately crafted, full of moving and highly privileged moments of discovery.

The real gift of Elf is the simple pleasure of a sweet and funny comedy that genuinely embraces its message of holiday cheer and still has fun goofing with it.

The film is an audience-pleaser, but very calculated and far from Curtis' best work: His script will go to any lengths to be cute, and his direction tends to be overly broad. In the end, he wears us out with the sheer volume of witty and endearing characters.

No, it doesn't exactly re-create the magic that made the original such an instant classic, but it's faster and more involving than "Reloaded" and it rounds off the premise and themes of the trilogy in a surprisingly satisfying way.

The best thing the movie has going for it is Kidman's performance.

A one-note farce that struggles just to remain on key.

The sharpest journalism thriller I've seen in years: an absolutely riveting drama that doesn't glorify its subject in the slightest and shrewdly says a lot of very sad things about the state of modern journalism.

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.

It's really Harris' movie, and he brings to it just the right blend of engaging affability, gruff strength of character and transcendent nobility of spirit to make it a genuinely enriching experience.

Where the Wayanses flogged every last chuckle from their belabored ideas, Zucker spring-loads his gags and lets them fly in rapid-fire succession. Not everything hits the target, but he tosses so many of them off with a wink and a grin that they catch you by surprise.

Has an unforced, pleasingly New Age feel to it; an unexpected but satisfying ending (a la "Shrek"); and a script that -- despite its overdone, body-switching premise -- comes together to nicely convey a cogent, environmentally conscious moral lesson.

What the film does extremely well is take us deep into the crime scene, and give faces to the victims so we can experience this epic, incomprehensible and somehow prototypically American act of violence on a more personal and intimate level.

Despite his harrowing real-life experiences, Downey, good as he is, is simply too young for the part. This callow telling begs for a more mature approach.

Actually, the film may be too grubby and sordid and ghoulish for its own box-office good. It's certainly going to send more than a few of the New Zealand director's sensitive women fans running from the auditorium.

Efforts to expand the envelope of grotesquery make the film repulsive and suspenseless, and it sorely misses original director Tobe Hooper's grisly, wily sense of humor.

The irony is that when the movie plays it safe, it succeeds admirably; when it attempts to be about something, it rings false.