In all, about a third of the film (most of it contained in three extended sequences) is audaciously funny and genuinely disturbing. The rest will sorely test the devotion of Carrey's fans.

It's an action junkie's angry fix -- 130 minutes of sound and fury, signifying nothing but big bucks and boundless contempt for viewer intelligence.

Essentially, this is RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK without the narrative savvy and self-referential cleverness.

This examination of unexamined lives is beautifully acted by all involved, notably former pop diva Deborah Harry, whose nuanced portrayal of a middle-aged tart is almost painful to watch.

Whip together TV's The Invaders and V. Fold in cult classic Enemy From Space and season with a dash of Species. The yield: an agreeable cocktail of paranoid sci-fi conventions that bubbles along energetically, despite surprisingly low-tech trappings

Nielsen's schtick is getting pretty threadbare by now -- his movies used to wring laughs from assaults on his silver-haired dignity, but after years of screen buffoonery, he has no dignity left to assault.

The result is a gracefully plotted spy film in the classic mode, with just enough self-consciousness to keep things interesting.

Even on a purely sentimental level, Free Willy this ain't: The product placements are the most promiscuous in recent memory --perhaps in history -- and all but the smallest children will sense the cynicism underlying this superficially noble shaggy fish story.

Extreme-weather buffs, thrill-ride junkies and anyone else in search of mindless entertainment need look no further.

A slow-paced but hypnotically absorbing movie, it's buoyed by Jarmusch's trademark off-key humor and embellished throughout by an electrifying instrumental score, courtesy of Neil Young.

This tart but fluffy paean to good sense and clean linen is a bracing reminder that the reason the English think they're so clever is that they are -- some of them, at any rate.

Compared to this brash, lunkheaded vehicle for "Baywatch" star Pamela Anderson Lee, the Barb Wire graphic novels are masterpieces of subtlety and narrative restraint.

The feminist subtext here is intentional -- the credits list a Wiccan priestess as witchcraft consultant! -- but any subtlety soon gets lost in the thud and blunder of special effects, trendy music and a predictable Hollywood-style climax.

The film does nothing to demythologize the '60s; rather, it uses prevailing myths as a substitute for critical thinking.

This lowbrow romp doesn't even have the courage of its own infantile grossness.

Garofalo and Thurman breathe some eccentric life into the cliches, and charming Chaplin is a walking warning to Hugh Grant, almost adorable enough to warrant all the trouble.

Plummer's fearlessness is awesome -- just try to imagine another actress willing to bare so much bony flesh wrapped in clanking chains -- but her character is nevertheless a ranting bore.

Everything looks fabulous, but the fight scenes are stagy, the dialogue stilted, the characters underdeveloped and the tone superficially cynical.

Somehow, Hollywood has managed to reinvent the hard-boiled source novel -- Cornel Woolrich's "I Married a Dead Man" -- as a soft-centered candy of a comedy, and the result is indigestible.

It's not that the heckling isn't funny -- it is, at least sometimes -- but we just can't stand that smug, superior attitude, predicated on the notion that everything that isn't new and flashy is ipso facto ridiculous.

There are some very funny bits, but they're interspersed with long stretches of exposition that drag the whole thing down, down, down.

CELTIC PRIDE supplies predictably lowbrow yocks for jocks, and its rather disturbing racial implications go entirely unacknowledged.

This could have been trashy fun, if it had moved along briskly a la CLASS OF 1984. But it's self-important and dreary, marred by murky cinematography and painfully unconvincing pauses for character development.

It's probably just passable for children, but adolescents won't sit still for this bland mixture of mediocre jokes and soft-core action.

A sober, intelligent drama with surprising integrity.

Testosterone-driven entertainment with a moral, sleekly directed by James Foley.

As you'd expect from Disney, the film's a technical tour de force, with flawless stop-motion animation and some imaginatively realized live-action sequences. What's surprising here is how much of Dahl's misogyny is allowed to surface. James's elderly aunts are unconscionably grotesque.

The sky-high sleaze quotient -- lascivious priests, amateur porn movies, teenage hustlers and institutionalized corruption of every kind -- ought to guarantee fun for all, but heavy messages keep poking through and spoiling everything.

Its assets are considerable: affecting performances (especially Irma P. Hall as blind Aunt T.) and sharp writing.

Less spectacular but more effectively atmospheric than Akira, Ghost in the Shell should gratify anime buffs and may well hook the uninitiated.

Martin's Bilko is a career grifter who comes out on top every time. He's a Bilko for the nasty '90s, oily and smug.

Highly unlikely plot complications never once threaten to throw this remarkably amusing film off-track, thanks to the narrative intelligence of writer-director David O. Russell, the only member of the filmmaking bratpack who seems to understand how movies work and why they entertain.

Hilarious and stunningly frank, writer-director Todd Solondz's evocation of awkward adolescence is a bracing antidote to the counterfeit nostalgia of "The Wonder Years" or "My So-Called Life".

Spike Lee's newest is really a surprisingly vivid dramatic study of an aspiring actress in moonlighting hell.

Competently directed by respected film editor Stuart Baird, it's a glossy production with plenty of Things That Go Boom, courtesy of producer/demolition expert Joel Silver.

This may be the warmest movie the Coen brothers have ever made. There's something unmistakably human beneath the oh-so-clever surface.

This drag comedy is aimed squarely at middle America, where these cuddly queens should play very well -- just so long as nobody remembers that gay people don't just sing show tunes and cook delightful meals; they also have sex.

A woman's picture with a few - precious few - contemporary flourishes.

Ambitious though it may be, this fourth entry in the HELLRAISER saga is easily the least of the film series.

A contemptible excuse for a romantic comedy.

It sounds like an overfamiliar brand of Southern Gothic, but British director Terence Davies adds some distinctive touches of visual poetry.

Exactly what you'd expect. This moderately amusing formula comedy is the screen debut of sitcom star Kelsey Grammer (Frasier), who plays a naval commander charged with piloting a WWII-era submarine in war games against the high-tech nuclear fleet.

Filmed in Vancouver (which looks like nobody's idea of the Bronx), the film is a throwback to the hoary chop-socky conventions that gave Hong Kong cinema its shabby reputation.

Relentlessly gray and paralyzed by narrative inertia, it collapses under the weight of its stars.

This lightweight road picture about a group of inept thieves has an uneven beginning but ends up charming and satisfying.

Sorry excuse for a comedy.

This adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic adventure novel features plenty of not-too-menacing pirates, and exactly the sort of schtick one expects from the Muppets. It will provide an entertaining diversion for children and adults.

Throughout, Pacino absolutely nails the hollow but overpowering charisma that is so easily mistaken for leadership; anyone whose heart has ever been broken by a politician will recognize it at once.

Wavers between being condescending and downright preposterous, but there are redeeming moments.

The vestiges of Woo's achingly romantic style play badly in this can-do context, while the mayhem is never more -- and occasionally less -- than competent.

A misshapen allegory wrapped around a truly awe-inspiring set piece, Ridley Scott's latest is another waste of his prodigious talent.

Since BLACK SHEEP was directed by talented Penelope Spheeris (WAYNE'S WORLD), we had some hope that we'd find it marginally less distasteful than TOMMY BOY. We were disappointed.

Rodriguez's film is a high-octane fun-house ride with only one speed: sick-making.

It's all too mawkishly life-affirming for words, the sort of film that wins Golden Globe Awards for its tear-jerking sincerity. And you thought -- hoped? -- they didn't make movies like this anymore.

A potentially amusing comic premise -- dropping a pair of anarchic stoners into the spaced-out, sanctimonious world of New Age bio-dome enthusiasts -- gets submerged in a shower of witless gags and the feeble one-joke persona of MTV celebrity Pauly Shore.

This time around, expect more of the same -- a tedious, muddleheaded tale about a malevolent spirit haunting cyberspace -- with somewhat tastier special effects.

While there are a couple of genuine laughs here, this AIRPLANE!-style collection of gags and blackouts is strangely sour and ultimately wearisome.

Call it Death Wish Goes Suburban.

Only the sheer force of Sandra Bullock's apparently ingenuous charm keeps this sodden romantic comedy afloat.

That Terry Gilliam managed to make Twelve Monkeys into a clever, complex, and poignant success is as astonishing as it is satisfying.

Sarandon is terrific and Penn is in top form, but the film is an achingly earnest message movie with a curiously muddled message.

From its explosive intro to its surprisingly giddy finale (think WHITE HEAT), this glossy adaptation is arch, nasty fun.

The whole point is to reproduce the experience of the first movie (and every other Lemmon-Matthau pairing) with mechanical precision. And so it does.

Renny Harlin's big, chaotic pirate flick is best understood as an attempt to revive the waning career of his wife, Geena Davis, but he's done her no great favor. As Morgan Adams, a sort of distaff Errol Flynn, poor Geena gets lost in a hectic scenario that's littlemore than an excuse for a series of thunderous explosions, clanky sword battles and run-of-the-mill spectacular stunts.

The film represents a retreat from the explicitly political concerns of TO LIVE (which landed the director in serious trouble with P.R.C. authorities), but there's a distinct satirical subtext underlying Zhang's Chinese Gangland, a place of limitless greed, self-destructive ritual and fatal hubris.

A lurching, addlebrained biopic that lacks even the crackpot energy of JFK, Oliver Stone's Nixon struggles to invest its nakedly venal subject with tragic dignity.

It didn't sound like fun to us, either, but we were wrong; Heat scores on many fronts...The plot, though it seems to ramble, builds suspense with deft precision, and the action set pieces are triumphs.

Regrettably, however, the weird elegance of Chris Van Allsburg's much-praised picture book has been all but lost in translation.

Billed as the first film to originate from the newly democratic South Africa, this disappointing prestige production is a ploddingly earnest adaptation of Alan Paton's 1948 novel.

You may end up wishing for a little less show and a lot more substance.

A truly lousy reworking of a Billy Wilder misfire... The story is drearily predictable, the leads are charmless -- Ormond's 15 minutes are probably already behind her -- and the direction, by the usually reliable Sidney Pollack, is strictly by the numbers.

For once, Thompson turns in a gimmick-free performance, and the rest of the actors range from fine to fabulous. But the whole thing feels stolid and uninspired.

Harrowing and heartfelt, with knockout performances by a pair of fine actresses.

In all, it's fairly harmless, tolerably sentimental and mildly entertaining: just the thing for the kind of holiday afternoon when you've had way too much of your relatives.

Largely vapid, borderline homophobic, and surprisingly treacly.

The product is an ambitious but awkward movie that jumps forward and back in time; voice-over narration fails to smooth over the choppiness. Nevertheless, it's studded with haunting, melancholy sequences, and Jeff Bridges is one of a handful of contemporary stars with enough stature and substance to carry off Hickock's mythic resonance.

The film is immensely entertaining and occasionally inspiring, a delirious combination of Slavic solemnity, Latin exoticism, Communist idealism and breathtakingly beautiful images.

An accomplished film that carries with it the unshakable feeling that we've seen it all before.

Clever, fast-moving and unobtrusively self-conscious.

Douglas's Chief Executive is no vote-getter; he's a charmless, irritating boob who can't even order flowers for a woman. With friends like Douglas and Reiner, Clinton doesn't need Rush Limbaugh.

The writers get the mix just about right, and first-time Bond director Martin Campbell moves things along fairly briskly.

This modern-day hybrid of "The Prince and the Pauper" and "The Parent Trap" is a slickly contrived showcase for the professionally cute Olsen Twins, late of TV's Full House.

His emphasis on acting is welcome at a time when shallow, smirkingly self-referential performances threaten to become the Hollywood norm, but the film's slack pacing and narrative indiscipline undermine its intensity.

This sequel to 1994's surprise blockbuster is shamelessly stupid, willfully juvenile and generally just plain gross -- which is, after all, the point.

Is there no one in Allen's circle who dares to tell the master this ain't funny?

From a sharp, jaundiced script by W.D. Richter ("Buckaroo Banzai"), Jodie Foster has directed a poisoned paean to the great American tradition of torturous family gatherings.

Not bad enough to be good.... This vigorous, pinheaded action flick asks us to accept Cindy as a lawyer.

Polish director Agnieska Holland paid no mind to the actors' accents during casting, and the melange of British, French and American speech helps sink a film that's already foundering under the weight of its pretentions.

Leaving Las Vegas is special. A courageous plane wreck of character study.

Aside from some effective suspense sequences, the film's strengths lie in the relationship between the heroines, which is well developed and plausible by genre standards.

Vampire in Brooklyn, a purported "comic tale of horror and seduction" that is neither funny nor frightening, just unpleasant.

For the terminally hip and/or terminally adolescent.

Get Shorty's assortment of lowlifes and high rollers is a familiar one, but it's still deeply satisfying.

Smith brazenly ignores plot conventions and concentrates on an apparently endless stream of crude and occasionally clever one-liners.

Feels less like a movie than a lost episode of the old Steve Allen or Jack Paar late-night chat shows.

It hurts to see this story reach for a tidy ending... STRANGE DAYS hurtles down the track for two hours, frantically trying to warn us en route to the Big Switchback, only to pull up in a hiss of smoke and hot air.

Jade's seamy excesses would be conventional in a direct-to-video erotic thriller; in a major studio production, they're embarrassing.

First-time director Noah Baumbach seems to have learned everything he knows about the world from MTV, and his style suggests that he's taken a lot of notes at Whit Stillman and Hal Hartley pictures.