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.