Shorter and punchier but nearly as hokey as the original.

David Duchovny delivers a clearly heartfelt but terminally mawkish and awkward directorial debut in House of D.

It lacks the genuine wit to elevate it to a truly satirical level.

The Game of Their Lives has a great sports story to tell, yet the filmmakers fumble it away.

The drama gets stuck in a dispiritingly dull rut and fails to build toward what is supposed to be a something of a crowd-rousing triumph over adversity.

Acting is similarly routine with the glorious exception of Hilton, who is so bad she steals the show.

Garcia has his moments as a wild man but the script never really allows him to plumb the artist's emotional depths.

The film is thought-provoking but not terribly involving.

Sequins will tax the patience of most viewers not enthralled with endless close-ups of beads and brocades.

The story itself is silly and exaggerated.

Ultimately neither funny nor touching enough to make much of an impact, but it does offer many small, insightful moments along the way.

This adaptation of South African writer Olive Schreiner's cult novel is too cute by far, sapping emotional resonance from a story that was in its original incarnation apparently far darker.

An often imaginative though less than magical family feature.

Ultimately comes across as a soporific costume drama featuring a gallery of miscast stars.

It's a chick flick with a vengeance but even in its most sentimental moments, stars Hilary Duff and Heather Locklear make this feel-good-about-yourself movie feel ... well, good.

A hit-and-miss affair. It has moments of unexpected, offbeat comedy, but most of the time neither the characters nor the situations engage the viewer.

King of the Corner has been adapted from Gerald Shapiro's "Bad Jews and Other Stories" and suffers from an odd, disjointed quality.

Despite the labors of leads Nicole Kidman and Will Ferrell, there's no screen magic being made here.

Herbie: Fully Loaded is, pure and simple, a children's film.

Despite many interesting mise-en-scene moments, the film disappointingly feels as sterile as the family's immaculately clean house. In a sense, the movie is too ambitious.

Results in a film that's more exploitative than sympathetic. Compared to the works of fellow Francophone directors Catherine Briellat and Clare Denis, Doueiri's depiction of female sexuality in Lila Says is both wooden and pat.

Predictable yet passably entertaining.

Politically charged docu-drama is uneven but delivers powerful message.

Although The Reception boasts some moments of emotional truth, its small scale and claustrophobic atmosphere make it a tough sit despite its brief time.

Benjamin Brand's script never levels with a viewer.

It's unfortunate that a film designed to renew interest in Ulmer is this flat.

Even the art house crowd will find the film off-putting not only because of its vagueness but because of its thoroughly unlikable characters.

Every bit as vulgar, sophomoric and thoroughly tasteless as 1999's Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo. But what is most annoying is the sequel's capability of inducing laughter even as one hates oneself for so easily succumbing to the total silliness of it all.

If you take any of this seriously, you are not going to enjoy the movie very much. But as an absurd riff on baadasssss gangsta movies, Four Brothers has an undeniable visceral kick.

The film brings a spectacular but little-known chapter of World War II to the big screen with meticulous attention to period detail -- and almost none to compelling narrative.

Sticking to one joke in an unconscionably long film makes for a very stale, witless and repetitive comedy.

A love story that veers uneasily between mysticism and melodrama.

This ultra-violent revenge thriller is far more notable for its baroque excesses than coherence or credibility.

A wheel-spinner. The more the film stresses and strains to be funny, the unfunnier it gets.

Bram Stoker would be, well, horrified.

While all this might have made for a potent short subject, the abstract visual monotony begins to wear thin shortly into the 98-minute running time.

A Spanish-language black comedy with a frenetic style that plays out like regurgitated Tarantino and Guy Ritchie.

Derrickson's characters are reduced to ciphers in a theological debate. Long wedges of the film are simply a discussion about the relative merits of science and superstition. Carpenter, as the sick girl, puts in the best performance.

There's some nice low-key work amid the uneven performances, but the Montana-shot film's key strength is its sense of place.

Viewers hoping to understand the senseless phenomenon of football hooliganism would do better to rent Alan Clarke's nearly 20-year-old "The Firm."

Despite the updated setting and some on-the-money performances, the sleek if dramatically flimsy results make for a less than great "Gatsby."

There is something really nasty about this cold, calculating exercise in mob psychology and human venality.

A drab, minor-key melodrama.

Zeroes in on retail mania with a flimsy wire hanger of a premise.

While the juvenile performances are bright and engaging, and there's no shortage of genuinely humorous observations about love and life in the Big Apple, there's an inescapable small-screen dynamic to the scope and rhythm of the production.

Will primarily strike a chord with Latina-skewing audiences with minimal crossover potential.

A muddled melodrama about the shady and questionable though not quite illegal world of "sports advisers."

Thanks to dynamic performances by Keira Knightley, Mickey Rourke, Edgar Ramirez and a strong cast -- sometimes all but buried beneath irksome stylistic flourishes -- this dark and absurd melodrama certainly has raw energy.

Tedious humor and sentimentality bury what could have been a pretty good road picture.

Directed with aching purpose by Lawrence David Foldes from a script he wrote with Grafton S. Harper, the lavish-looking but hackneyed memory play is small-screen fodder at best.

A drama that is more contemplative at times than dramatic yet one containing several powerful moments.

Plot, character development and dialogue are so sparse that the screenwriters are fortunate they're not paid by the word. But this basic approach doesn't render it ineffectual. There's so little to go wrong that those who like their entertainment mindless and violent will find little fault.

Ultimately has the air of a home movie project blown up to feature-length proportions.

This flaccid psychological thriller keeps spoiling its own surprise by constantly signaling the big plot twist.

Ultimately, its success may depend on how emotionally satisfying audiences find this flirtation with Jewish mysticism.

A splendid idea for a film goes largely wasted despite a brave performance by Naomi Watts as a struggling actress trying to figure it all out in Hollywood.

Definitely acquired-taste material and will perform best in the hipper, bigger rooms.

Tedious portrait of a troubled Rolling Stone.

As bland and forgettable as its title.

Unable to decide whether it wants to be a rambunctious family comedy or a tender romantic comedy, the Dennis Quaid-Rene Russo vehicle strains to be both and ends up falling short of both marks.

The character and geographical jumps leave you in a muddle with thinly sketched personalities and confusing plot points. Worse, dialogue dense with nuance and shaded meaning flies by too quickly.

Despite its contemporary sheen, it's very old-fashioned in its storytelling and structure. Unfortunately, it's more muscle than high-formula, and it clanks, sputters and spins out in its pedal-to-the-story medal style.

Spends too much time on unconvincing romantic-comedy contrivances to be consistently engaging. Throughout the uneven film and its mixed bag of performances, the compelling point of focus is Diane Keaton's smart, funny, spot-on natural portrait of the formidable Stone matriarch.

The best two performances belong to Uma Thurman and Will Ferrell. For the film to work, though, the two best roles should belong to Tony-winning Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick in the title roles.

While the 1977 Fun With Dick and Jane was a reasonably diverting sendup of conspicuous consumption with a subversive if not always razor-sharp comic edge, the new version... replaces smart performances with tired shtick.

An auspicious debut from first time Aussie writer/director Greg Mclean, film combines the style of cheesy horror films and the flair of classic thrillers.

This wannabe daring comedy about a man who attempts to "fix" the Special Olympics strains for that patented naughty and nice balance with squirmingly squishy results.

A fascinating historical tale is rendered with less than compelling results in this pseudo-documentary.

A feeble medieval epic with a lackluster romance at its center.

Deeply frustrating because of its brevity and its lack of solid information and historical context.

It might have been inspired by actual events, but End of the Spear is, literally and figuratively, simply too dull to make any impact.

A small-scale character piece that genuinely likes its protagonists: an overweight teen girl and an overage delivery guy. But for all its quirky touches, the comedy cleaves to formula in its depiction of how they challenge and change each other.

Packing in enough cliches for a dozen movies, this drama about a sensitive young man trying to achieve his dreams via the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis will best be enjoyed by the generation unfamiliar with "An Officer and a Gentlemen," "Top Gun" and any preceding boxing movies.

Roving Mars is bound to inspire hordes of young science geeks to dream about sending in their resumes. The rest of us may not feel so excited.

Designed to capitalize on the title and premise of the original but offers little to those who fondly remember it.

While screenwriter Howard Himelstein and director Mike Barker have done a workable job of drawing the Wilde social satire out of the drawing room, the film never quite manages to travel at the same buoyant velocity as the acerbic wit.

Written by "Final Destination" screenwriter Jeffrey Reddick, the film has its dubious pleasures, not the least of which is the extended sight of nubile lead actress Jenna Dewan in a bustier, high heels and killer miniskirt.

With the exception of a few unpredictable moments from Zooey Deschanel and Will Ferrell, Winter Passing finds only cliche as it reaches for profundity.

Neither good nor so-bad-it's-good, Perry's odd oeuvre has an allure all its own.

McConaughey and Parker get stranded with thanklessly predictable scenes, while Zooey Deschanel, Kathy Bates and Terry Bradshaw garner the film's few laughs.

It attempts to walk the fine line between despair and comedy, reality and imagination, and often succeeds. For audiences prepared to take the leap of faith and accept the unusual tone of the film, Game 6 should be a winner. Others may wonder what the fuss is about.

What might have made for an interesting short film lacks the weight to sustain its feature (albeit, brief) length, and even the presence of Mel Gibson, Jim Caviezel (in full bloody Christ mode) and Monica Bellucci is unlikely to attract any but the "Passion" obsessed.

A passable horror-thriller for the young crowd, assuming a movie can lure them away from PlayStations.

The film clearly wishes to explore the topic of children having children, but it only inspires a great desire to smack them both.

The film is an elegiac journey to a sweeter, more civilized place in the heart. Predictable and decidedly old-fashioned in its sensibility, the film is likely to win over audiences if not critics.

The humor emphasizes quantity over quality, but the batting average isn't too bad. And where else can you witness Leslie Nielsen do a nude scene?

A film with none of the heart that has characterized Weitz's best work and none of the freshness of his most successful.

An unconvincing psychosexual drama that tries to reconfigure the classic romantic triangle but winds up looking like a preposterous pretzel.

Call this one "Brother Act." Instead of Whoopi Goldberg's Reno lounge singer in "Sister Act," Preaching to the Choir has a hip-hop star hiding out from a gangsta record producer in his estranged brother-minister's Harlem church.

Ultimately more laughable than illuminating, at times approaching a level of camp commensurate with John Waters.

Golhardt's screenplay has enough quirkily charming moments to compensate for its plethora of stereotypical characters and cliched situations, and director Sherry Hormann provides a light enough touch to make the proceedings palatable, if not quite enjoyable.

With an "Animal House"-ish deportment, Art School likely will entertain a sophomoric audience and etch some winning college-kid figures, but art house audiences will be disappointed by its paint-by-numbers storytelling.

A blandly generic family film.

Edward Norton serves as lead actor and producer, but even his star power won't help this misfire reach a wide domestic audience.

Shades of "Like Water for Chocolate" and "Chocolat" -- but unlike the latter's tender Juliette Binoche-Johnny Depp romance, the ordained Rai-McDermott union fails to generate any convincing heat, and no amount of cardamom pods or lotus root is going to help.

While Giuliani Time offers a wealth of important information that many might have long forgotten, its impact is diluted by its heavily biased nature and lack of balance.

Audiences expecting a good time will instead be rewarded with wildly unsympathetic lead characters and uncomfortably long stretches without a laugh in sight.

The documentary is an act of political activism. Guggenheim and his politically conscious producers, Laurie David, Lawrence Bender and Scott Z. Burns, have no interest in either challenging Gore's viewpoint or giving opposing opinions equal time. The film is simply a conduit for Gore's message.