Lyne's direction is sometimes overblown -- debauched playwright Clare Quilty's (Frank Langella) appearance amid the pale fire of exploding bug-zappers really is a bit much -- and the unfortunate fact is that the novel is one long tease, an intricate, seductive game in which words are as important as deeds.

Ali G Indahouse simply revels in mainstream inanity, doing its incremental bit to dumb down the popular movie going experience and encourage rampant stupidity. There's nothing funny about that.

Unfortunately, Petrie's idea of dramatic tension is to expose more boyish flesh as the movie progresses. And as more and more lumpy young pectorals are flashed, more and more people and objects are exploded. All this is accompanied by a persistently obnoxious soundtrack that features patriotic fanfares. And as the four different plots bump into each other like blinded laboratory animals, we begin to feel empathy if not pity for everyone involved.

In the end it's simply another Chucky movie -- whether that's a recommendation or a warning is entirely up to you.

How well you'll tolerate this utterly unhinged quasi-feminist comic book fantasy depends on your Lori Petty threshold. As the title character--a smartass riot grrrl who rolls through a fanciful postapocalyptic landscape in a tank, occasionally pausing to snuggle and bicker with her mutant kangaroo boyfriend (Ice-T) -- Petty's onscreen virtually nonstop, and her hyperkinetic mugging, jerking, whining, and sassing wears thin after a while.

With its brisk pace, breezy dialogue and gently jaundiced view of the rites of filmmaking, this is one of Jaglom's most accessible and genuinely enjoyable films.

There are few things as imposing -- or terrifying -- as the sight of the B-52, and the film is beautifully shot with an almost fetishistic passion.

Once the excellent Rhys and Corunder are off-screen, the film's overall staginess and the inconsistent work of the supporting cast become glaringly apparent.

Funny, thought-provoking and, yes, touching.

This tepid romantic comedy not only fails to break the rules, but it follows them to the letter.

In the end, Spacey's devotion to Darin may have blinded him to the bigger picture.

It's the supporting characters' combination of smarts and sass, not to mention an honest and positive depiction of the mentally challenged, that turns this potentially crude and heartless comedy into something that the Special Olympics actually endorses.

This interminable melodrama purports to be a warm, humorous, and moving look at the relationship of two women over the course of 30 years. In reality BEACHES is a trite, maudlin, and terribly superficial effort of the sub-made-for-TV quality, an insult to anyone who has ever befriended another human being.

An eccentric historical horror tale whose blackly comic tone wavers distracting.

The supporting cast is excellent, especially Scott Wilson as an astronaut who flipped out on the launching pad and aborted his mission. Offbeat, visionary, and challenging.

The right combination of goofy character behavior, action set pieces, and narrative drive to keep the movie from ever being boring.

Owen Wilson single-handedly hauls this amiable, middle-of-the-road comedy out of sheer mediocrity.

If this pairing sounds like movie magic to you, we're sure you'll love the picture.

The film's conceits grow thin and von Trier's mocking, hectoring tone tiresome.

Airheads commits the cardinal sin of satire: it's not sure what it's making fun of.

Gorgeous but seriously unsatisfying.

Still odder is the movie's sexual worldview, which is simultaneously infantile and fetishistic. Boys wear rubber, lipstick, and spandex, but don't seem to have a sexual bone in their unmuscled bodies.

Formulaic but surprisingly affecting drama.

Shot largely in Toronto and cast with the best of the B-list, this film has the low-rent gloss of a made-for-cable thriller.

An Arthurian tale minus everything the average person knows or cares about Arthur and his knights.

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.

Given its premise, it's hard for any Hostel sequel to be little more than a rehash.

What makes the film more interesting than it might have been, however, is the warm relationship between Glenn and Peter.

THE CARE BEARS MOVIE, like other animated children's films of its ilk, is a double-edged sword. On one hand, this is perfect viewing for three- to six-year-olds, while at the same time it is little more than a 75-minute advertisement for the vast array of Care Bears toys and products.

Ranks among the best films ever made about the acting profession.

Maybe such cloddish sight gags as dipsomaniac priest chug-a-lugging from the communion chalice or an apparently straight-laced yuppie in full S&M drag just aren't very funny.

The movie's "shock" payoff still feels like a cheap trick.

Odd yet thoughtful romantic comedy.

Instead of leading to a crafty, emotionally cathartic payoff, WHITE SANDS gets more tiresome and banal as it goes along and all its threads are tied up with neat, if outlandish, explanations. WHITE SANDS would have been a better film if it had remained more dreamlike and less tied to plot mechanics.

No matter what, it's safe to say that this entirely acceptable retooling of the franchise makes for a satisfying experience for those who enjoy four-wheeled chases, hot bodies, hot cars, and a tall dose of tough-guy machismo.

Director John N. Smith, who helmed last year's masterly "The Boys of St. Vincent", is reduced to carrying Michelle Pfeiffer's baggage in this assembly-line star vehicle.

The child actors are bland, the adult characters are forced to act like dunderheads to keep the paper-thin plot going, and the generic-sounding Jimmy Buffett songs are just a LITTLE out of sync with the film's target age group.

Though unpolished and formulaic, this tribute to the power of faith and music benefits from the contributions of musicians Tamyra Gray, a first-generation American Idol contestant who plays D.T.'s wholesome love interest; Grammy winner Kirk Franklin, who contributed six songs — three original — to the rousing soundtrack; and faith-based singers Yolanda Adams, Martha Munizzi, Fred Hammond (who also executive produced) and Delores Winans.

The non-stop insouciance soon becomes more grating than charming, and is sustained by some remarkably flat dialogue. Adding to the film's troubles is the gratuitously "cute" use made of the baby--one scene exists purely so the audience can coo appreciatively as she takes her first steps. Ten minutes of this, and Nick and Nora Charles would have ducked home for a highball.

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.

It feels as though everyone involved was having a rollicking good time, and while the film itself is wildly uneven, Lin and company get in a few pointed jabs at Hollywood fatuousness and self-delusion, cultural stereotypes and '70s fashions.

Only McKellan seems to understand the profound silliness of the film in which he finds himself, and he camps it up accordingly.

Jim Carroll's dreamy, pseudo-poetic memoir of a misspent New York boyhood - standard equipment for alienated adolescents of the 90s - is predictably re-tooled as an anti-drug message vehicle.

It's not that you can't go home again. It's that you SHOULDN'T, at least not in a lowbrow Hollywood comedy, because your family will inevitably be lewd, crude, loud and obnoxious.

A smartly stylized hoot.

Tame as can be by today's standards, but will charm fans of vintage erotica.

The film is a dispiriting experience.

Surprisingly, some of the best moments come from supermodel Crawford and singer Connick, two acting tyros not generally known for their dramatic skills.

Mehta says it all so articulately and with such good humor.

It's a classic fantasy scenario, overflowing with creative possibilities, but Carrey's Nolan isn't charmingly misguided or comically loathsome enough to deserve the lesson; he's just a big, inconsequential crybaby.

He (Allen) seems to have forgotten that comedy is all about timing, letting individual scenes meander -- often to accommodate his own stammering monologues -- and giving viewers far too much downtime in which to consider the staleness of many of the film's gags.

The surprise is how utterly original his (Woodley's) gorgeously mounted curiosity seems.

Ruzowitzky concentrates on delivering on sporadic scares at the expense of figuring out how to make individual scenes coalesce into a coherent chiller about medical megalomania.

The less time you've devoted to thinking about the nature and uses of the erotic imagination, the more challenging this will seem.

Wan's debut feature is a twisted, squirm-inducingly nasty bit of work, which isn't a criticism because that's exactly what he and cowriter Leigh Whannell had in mind.

The limp thriller plot Deery constructs to frame his theological inquiries is both artificial and not very interesting, a lethal combination.

Orenna, Thornton and Belton deliver strong, surprisingly subtle performances that make the modest fireworks genuinely engaging.

As to what happens between shows, well, apparently not a whole hell of a lot. If there are groupies, demolished hotel rooms, midnight payoffs to the vice squad or drug- and alcohol-fueled misbehavior, there's no evidence of it here.

The prodigiously talented Allen, Bates and Lange give it their all, but there's a limit to what even they can do with platitudes and prefabricated homilies.

No one was exactly clamoring for this one, and Bronson has vowed it will be the last Death Wish.

The film veers wildly from decent black comedy to dumb slapstick, and director Reynolds seems unsure of his own intentions. In a few places this film is quite funny, however, although De Luise and all the scenes he's in are unbearable.

By all accounts, the events depicted are historically accurate, but historical accuracy does not always guarantee a well-paced, interesting film.

Where Coffy had an exhilarating sense of fun underlying the mayhem, Foxy Brown is a darker, more mean-spirited picture. Rather than treating Foxy's travails as a setup for the inevitable vengeance, it seems to revel in her degradation.

Director Furie's stylistic method of dwelling on certain scenes, a penchant for close-ups so large and exasperating as to blot out the screen and confuse the vision, worked effectively in his Ipcress File, but here his shots of teeth, guns, horses' eyes, Brando's jowls, and Comer's brow are merely specious, distracting, and as amateurish as a TV director shooting into the sun for reflection or allowing water on the camera lens to remind the viewer that technicians are present.

Although not so clever or original as its predecessor, Futureworld is effective.

Die-hard fans will appreciate this rare glimpse of the great band at work, while mavens of unique musical instruments will delight in seeing Page "play" the seldom-used theramin (previously restricted to the Beach Boys's "Good Vibrations" and schlock horror movie soundtracks). Also, it's kind of fun watching the backstage hysterics of band manager Peter Grant, the man of legendary bad temper who was the basis for Spinal Tap's manager, Ian Faith, in THIS IS SPINAL TAP (1984).

Fred Zinnemann waited 40 years to make this surprisingly lifeless film, a major disappointment from the acclaimed director of High Noon and From Here To Eternity.

The film is pleasant but too hackneyed and heavy-handed to work well.

A good film for the viewer who isn't interested in being entertained but is willing to be thrown into the muck of the problems facing hard-working American farmers.

The result is the farthest thing from a bland, spineless sequel: It's a brutal, insanely excessive successor to grindhouse pictures of yore.

Funnier than you might imagine.

Done in by its tone.

You may give up on Ian Iqbal Rashid's feature debut long before things get interesting, courtesy of a distracting conceit that shatters whatever spell the hackneyed premise might cast.

Although the body count averages one murder every 7 1/2 minutes--which will undoubtedly please the gorehounds it was intended for--this film is slightly better than most slice-and-dice efforts and contains several genuine surprises.

Simultaneously sober and silly horror picture.

The film makes no real impression; it's amiable, occasionally funny and indistinguishable from dozens of other romantic comedies just like it.

Frequently brilliant director Boorman--always an interesting visual stylist--falls flat on his face with this pretentious piece of science-fiction claptrap that presents its dull ideas in such a confused and annoying fashion as to anger even the most devoted fan of the genre.

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.

One keeps waiting for something interesting to happen in Teen Witch, but it never does. Notwithstanding its supernatural elements, the film is basically a standard teenage love story (a squeaky clean one at that) with several unmemorable musical numbers thrown in.

The film is brought down by stereotypical characters and a curiously dated view of Africa.

The major problem with White Nights is that it tries to be so many things at once that it fails to be much of anything other than a vehicle to watch two of the best dancers around strut and tap their stuff.

It's mostly forced humor all the way, a movie that rarely measures up to adequate kitsch. Aimed at younger audiences, Spaceballs misses its mark.

Chock full of personality and irreverent detail.

This modest picture is distinguished by some marvelously bitchy dialogue.

This provocative, at times languid, documentary from German experimental filmmaker Gabriel Baur is something of travelogue through this unexplored frontier, a mixed-up, shook-up borderland where nothing, especially not an individual's gender, should be ever be taken for granted.

Fans of the original may be disheartened by this glossier, action-packed version, but the brisker pacing and showy shoot-'em-up scenes are exactly what will appeal to the film's target audience.

The best thing about the whole sorry enterprise is the soundtrack, which features choice tunes by Bruce Springsteen, Starsailor and, of course, Parsons himself.

Fleder delivers the requisite shocks, and his direction is brisk, efficient and occasionally stylish; Judd and Freeman both give more than the material demands.

Though by no means a great animated feature, JETSONS does offer unqualified family entertainment, and it even includes a socially responsive message. While the film is neither brilliant nor hilariously funny, it is frequently quite enjoyable, and fans of the Jetsons will not be disappointed.

An above-average thriller, offering a fresh hero based on "The Destroyer" series of novels (at least 120 of which are currently available).

THE MIGHTY DUCKS is harmless enough, but its schematic retread of a screenplay and its lethargic acting detracts from the unassuming, passable entertainment it might have been.

The Japanese sneak attack that plunged the US into WW II is lavishly and fairly accurately, if not enthrallingly, brought to the screen in this Japanese-US coproduction.

Even Stevenson, a singularly accomplished and versatile actress, can't do much with Julia's early scenes, in which she's forced to dither around like a complete idiot.

Biopic cliches hamstring producer-star Jennifer Lopez's pet project.

Cheerfully gross, deliberately retro horror picture pays tongue-in-cheek homage to the kind of genre movies Charles Band and Roger Corman's companies turned out in the 1980s.

Yes Man isn't without a few simple charms, but it ends up being about as funny, profound, and memorable as the average bumper sticker.

A disappointing, quickie follow-up that vainly tries to imitate the look of the original on an obviously limited budget, and for the most part, eschews the philosophical, social, and racial subtext of the first film in favor of straightforward shoot-em-up action and comic-strip characters.

Mindless but likable comedy about a failing Washington, DC, cab company that is revitalized when the eccentric group of cabbies work together to save it. A good cast makes the most of the uninspired material.