Chase is a veritable black-hole of mirthlessness who sucks every ounce of fun out what might otherwise be a fairly diverting comedy.

Salma Hayek steals the awkwardly formulaic, cliche-ridden show right out from under him (Perry).

Ultimately, Schrader pulls us into a mind-over-matter kind of purgatory: Fun and original as his film is, it lacks feeling and heart.

The surprise is that you won't hate it nearly as much as you expect -- thanks to a solid supporting cast, a cute cat and an even cuter Ricci -- and the manic pace will have the kids purring with delight.

A long, dark night o' slacker despair, courtesy of Richard Linklater and self-important blowhard Eric Bogosian.

These lessons are driven home via silly dialogue ("Her name was Marion and she loved volcanoes...") and painfully predictable plot complications, repeated often enough that there's no need to take notes, except for the benefit of friends who fall asleep.

Writer/director Craig Rosenberg is no master of subtlety -- in fact, he seems to have only two settings, whacking excess and treacly pathos -- and the film is awash in ponderous whimsy.

The result isn't very funny: There are clever bits, sure, but they're embedded in long, painfully obvious sequences built around one-shot gags.

Things quickly degenerate into a series of juvenile jokes about flatulence and bosoms, and by the end the cast is reduced to frantically manhandling a corpse for yucks. Not funny.

Steve Prefontaine must have been something special -- everyone says so -- but there's no magic on the screen.

The character relationships are solid and there's blessed little in the way of smug, smart talk

Farley -- one of the few comedians who could ever be justly accused of debasing the pratfall -- has made a film that's tantamount to watching an overweight man slip on a banana peel for nearly 90 minutes.

Tedious...To call the picture formulaic is to miss the point: It's so openly contemptuous of its audience that it doesn't even bother to run the formula.

There's nothing much new going on here (we feel compelled to point out the resemblance to one of the worst-ever episodes of The X-Files, "Teso Los Bichos"), but it's all slickly done, with the requisite big jumps, false leads, weird science and scary trips down dark corridors.

But long after you've grown tired of [Flynt's] escapades, the scenes in which he and Althea support one another against the slings an arrows of outrageous fortune are touching and, ultimately, genuinely tragic.

Alan Parker's big-budget adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's surpassingly shrewd stage spectacular isn't a big fat failure. But it isn't a resounding success, either: It's an awkward hybrid, neither lavish eye candy nor credible drama.

For a movie about all sorts of warm and gooey things -- faith, surrender to wonder, and the possibility of love in a hard, cold world -- it's got a bracingly astringent edge.

A gallon of grade-A filmmaking fuel squandered on unoriginal material, but serious moviegoers will want to take a look.

[A] bold and brilliant rendering of Henry James' masterpiece.

Compared with most of what passes for scary movies these days, this is golden: It's not stupid, it's not wussy and it pulls off a couple of pretty nasty jolts.

It's just as juvenile as you'd expect, and even funnier.

Yes, it's a deeply formulaic buddy movie predicated on geezer charm. But the surprise of this comedy about two former Chief Executives forced to get along and get in touch with the real America is how sharply written it is -- almost sharply enough to overcome the crude direction that grotesquely overemphasizes the picture's inevitable sentimental interludes.

A film that takes such sadistic delight in the thorough humiliation of its heroine.

Tony Award-winning stage director Jerry Zaks' debut feature is a gentle, surprisingly funny film about dying that manages to tug a few heartstrings without the usual emotional manhandling.

Unforgettably, Bastard out of Carolina makes a bold statement about a little girl's grace under inordinate pressure.

A meandering and deeply shallow tale of spiritual redemption.

It may seem mean-spirited to complain that in the end Burton's spectacle is a bit hollow. But his genius has always resided in his ability to give depth and a curious, dark richness to the ephemeral fluff of his pop-culture memories -- this is all sparkly surface.

The result is studded with brilliant moments and an eccentric cast.

Until the patently preposterous finale (you can just hear the studio suits saying, "Ya gotta make it big"), the miserable perils faced by the damp, sooty, squabbling motorists are claustrophobically convincing, assuming you accept in the first place that they escaped a fireball that looks as though it should have fried every living thing between the New Jersey and Manhattan shores.

The atmosphere is Southern Gothic pure enough to do Carson McCullers proud -- grotesque, sentimental and dankly nasty -- and Thornton manages not to undermine his own writing.

Since each is more adorable than the one before - and together they're an irresistible mass of squirming speckles - the whole elaborate edifice holds up pretty well.

Joan Allen -- playing goody-two-shoes Elizabeth Proctor -- is the standout: She gives Proctor both spine and a desperate, late-blooming awareness that her own unyielding righteousness has helped bring about her family's destruction. Her performance is so true it's almost painful.

Like most Trek movies, it's a bit talky and a bit thin, unless you come to it with an extensive background gleaned from the series. But then, who but a fan would be going anyway?

Perhaps a die-hard Freudian desperate for a laugh could find humor in this wretched attempt at a holiday heart-warmer. Unfortunately, that leaves the rest of us twisting in the wind.

Perfectly gorgeous and perfectly nasty.

Feel-good tone notwithstanding (and creepy to boot), there are nagging riddles about the Helfgott story that the film has neither the nerve nor the sense to tackle.

Kristin Scott Thomas is the film's revelation. She takes center stage as a smart, fearless woman who's utterly irresistible.

Ramshackle as comedy and mundane as drama, this noisily energetic and splashily - literally - photographed hang-ten flick doesn't wipe out due to spectacular surfing stunts and the fun of seeing McGregor and Zeta-Jones in pre-stardom mode.

The technical razzle-dazzle that lets Jordan dribble on the cartoon court and inserts Bugs and Daffy into the "real" world is, sad to say, less than dazzling: This is no WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT. Can we go now, please?

A trying, contrary mix of religion and carnality that teeters on the verge of preposterous self-indulgence.

Until the disappointingly conventional ending, in which dad and the head baddie go it mano a mano on the streets, this dark drama -- based on a 1956 Glenn Ford picture of the same name -- negotiates its narrative twists and turns with professional aplomb, even daring to make the hero an arrogant schmuck.

Writer-director Christopher Hampton's adaptation of Joseph Conrad's widely-read novel is an honorable failure, a screen version that's actually too faithful to its source.

The characters are two-dimensional types -- the good girl, the tough lesbian, the saintly mother -- but the cast gives its all. Just try not to get too distracted by the echoes of other movies, like DEAD END BOYZ N THE HOOD.

As the doomed lovers, DiCaprio and Danes -- both luminous, limpid-eyed beauties -- are allowed to deliver delicate, unpretentious performances, and their love becomes a modest, frighteningly fragile oasis amidst a tawdry saturnalia of noise and glitter.

Louise Fletcher is a walking sight gag as the evil principal, but just about every other gag falls flat and lies there, wheezing.

Gast doesn't hide his admiration for the charismatic Ali, whose antics provide the film's most enjoyable moments.

Halloween makes fright fans even more tolerant than usual of second-rate horror pictures, and this one still doesn't cut the mustard.

The genial humor is occasionally marred by an overall sexist tone and some downright nasty homophobic and racist attempts at humor.

The dullest movie ever made about child abuse, conspiracy and murder.

[Jude] is bristling, muscular Victorian noir. Of the scant handful of previous Hardy adaptations, none can match its intensity.

It all has an artless, ephemeral feel, and 20 years from now people will marvel at the fashions, the landscapes and the attitudes it captures like fragile bugs in amber.

The usual John Grisham legal hokum, tranformed by director James Foley into surprisingly grim and affecting stuff.

And while the film is unflinching in its depiction of the brutality of both the English and the Irish, Jordan pointedly dissociates his hero from any actual ugliness.

This is the kind of movie in which a dozen bad guys with an automatic weapon in each hand couldn't hit a lake if they were standing at the bottom of it, to steal the screenplay's best wiseacre remark.

Where Cassavetes often uncovered the grotesquerie underlying such desperate lives -- usually after one round too many -- Buscemi's vison is rooted in compassion and a quirky humor that's entirely his own.

A silly period production, built around the sorry spectacle of two smug American stars lording it over the natives... Based on true events, the film is nevertheless absolutely preposterous, and informed by stereotypes that don't play well in the 1990s.

The spectacle is absolutely enthralling, and even a bit frightening.

The result is flashy -- first-time directors Larry and Andy Wachowski never miss an opportunity to show us red, red drops of blood against brilliant white -- but pretty good fun, especially if the thought of Tilly in a succession of thigh-high bandage dresses makes you sweat.

It's so bright (even when it means to be serious) and bubbly that it seems mean to point out that it isn't really about anything -- except how cool sharkskin suits and Capri pants are.

The comedy is cruelly subliterate (powdered deer privates figure prominently), the action -- performed by an aging, dumpy Seagal -- pointless, and the story pieced together from moldy cliches.

A radiant, heartbreaking film.

It's not that this is a bad, blackly comic slice-of-lowlife: It's just that you've just seen it all before.

Hackman's role requires him to spend so little time on screen that it's virtually an above-the-title cameo, and Grant trots out his trademark charming mannerisms, which look a bit fresher than usual by virtue of the darker than usual context. Be warned: Director Michael Apted does not resist the temptation to preach.

The script is shapeless and it all goes on far too long.

Yes, it's great that Goldie Hawn, Diane Keaton and Bette Midler -- all women of a certain age, though they've done their best to make sure no one's certain what it is -- get to carry a major motion picture, playing college chums reunited by the perfidy of men.

This movie is a dreary endurance test.

An apparently unintentional parody of the he-man school of filmmaking, in which gunfire replaces dialogue and escalating violence passes for story development.

A meandering mess of violence and aging stars who've seen much better days, all buoyed up by an in-your-face soundtrack that never lets up.

This is family entertainment at its best: Intelligent and surprisingly unsentimental. And anyone who doesn't fall in love with those goslings has a heart of stone.

The whole sorry business is incontrovertible proof that Hollywood learned all the wrong lessons from 48 HRS.: Bring back Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy, please!

A tightly scripted cautionary tale about what happens when the lights go down in Southern California, hiding behind a generic action-thriller title.

This formulaic comedy is a real kid-pleaser, full of spitballs and slapstick mayhem. Most adults will be squirming long before the heartwarming finale -- what a drag it is getting old.

Indifferently directed and almost aggressively tedious, we'd call it cliched if they'd even bothered getting the cliches right.

Bright cunningly translates the story of Little Red Riding Hood into the trashy vernacular of tabloid TV and reality-based cop shows.

It's also pretty funny -- certainly more so than the first film.

But this $3.5-million rehash -- about the brothers Fitzpatrick and their troubles with girls -- is a real turnoff: smug, smarmy and utterly unconvincing.

As the barbaric Montgomery, who helps bring out the beast in the beast-men, Val Kilmer raids the closet of sinister mannerisms and tries them all on for size. Poor David Thewlis is in another movie entirely.

You can almost feel writer-director Ron Shelton praying for lightning to strike twice, but to no avail.

Director Tony Scott's stylistic flourishes haven't been put to such creepily seductive use since The Hunger.

This vulgar, supposedly comic horror tale about vampire hookers and religious morons is just plain gross.

Schnabel at least manages to tell a fairly coherent story. The bad news: It's not a very interesting story, and Schnabel doesn't have the chops to make it one by sheer strength of filmmaking prowess.

Francis Ford Coppola falls down and goes boom with this depressing, ill-conceived comedy.

Good, dirty, escapist fun.

For Hartley, the third time is definitely not the charm.

The movie is a genteel, witty soap opera designed to make everyone feel the better for having not only seen it, but having had a bit of fun.

Director Andrew Davis (THE FUGITIVE) punches out the action sequences with frightening efficiency, and The Fugitive Guy keeps things moving -- so fast, in fact, that it's easy to get lost in the tangle of conflicting conspiracies. The whole breathless business feels as though it should be over about 15 minutes before it is.

Tran's film is a startling achievement: brimming with moments of exquisite tenderness and shocking brutality -- sometimes simultaneously -- and each invested with an almost perverse beauty.

A Time to Kill seems to argue that America's racial problems aren't so bad because, even in the heart of bigoted Mississippi, a black man can get away with murder.

Captures the way drug addiction gives structure and purpose to aimless lives, and evokes the breathtaking rapture of a fix. All this and a happy ending, too.

A high-wire spook show without a net -- half the fun is watching it teeter between the tastelessly amusing and the unforgivably gross.

If the very idea of another movie about a bunch of overprivileged thirtysomethings and their relationships has you reaching for your revolver, Nicole Holofcener's winning debut feature will come as a pleasant surprise.

Despite the obvious potential for comic disaster, the results are only intermittently amusing. Keaton's Kinney is such a selfish, lemon-lipped wet blanket, you can't help wishing he'd been diminished a little with each cloning, until there was nothing left of him at all.

The aliens, meanwhile, are a fabulously nasty lot of slimy, tentacled, malevolent telepaths, but all their superior technology is no match for our red, white and blue ingenuity. Take that, space bullies!

In time-honored Hollywood fashion, PHENOMENON suggests that smart people are friendless freaks who'd be far better off if only they were just as dumb as the rest of us.

This remake of Jerry Lewis's 1963 Jekyll and Hyde comedy is slackly directed and overloaded with flatulence jokes.

Director/writer Andrew Bergman has a proven flair for screwball humor, and you can still discern traces of the lighthanded romp Striptease might have been if Moore hadn't reshaped the project to accommodate the formidable dimensions of her ego.

The film stumbles a bit towards the end (some deeply rooted conflicts are implausibly resolved), but terrific performances from a large cast -- particularly Elizabeth Pena as Sam's childhood sweetheart -- smooth over the rough spots.

Derivative and utterly implausible, ERASER is big-budget action filmmaking at its dullest.