The obsessive lust that drives Higgins to horrific extremes in Hellraiser was almost enough to carry that film, but Hellbound has no such straw to cling to, and the film collapses into a bloody mess of bravura set pieces that never add up to a satisfying whole.

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

It goes without saying that the humor is vulgar and juvenile.

Yet another totally absurd bout of macho wish fulfillment for those frustrated by the American government and military's inability to deal effectively with terrorism, Iron Eagle is actually more outlandish than most.

Stovall's film could have been a little shorter and a lot tighter.

Silly but not always funny, WILDCATS relies too much on Hawn's familiar screen persona, getting little mileage from the actress' "serious" moments, yet it manages to provide more than a chuckle or two.

It's all as campy as can be and a great time waster.

Director Armand Mastroianni, Marcello's American-born cousin, puts this oh-so-familiar material through its paces without injecting anything remotely resembling wit or personal style.

No one does deranged quite like Kathy Bates (the film's running gag involving Bates and the delicacies of Cajun cuisine is hilarious).

Bright, bubbly and thoroughly inconsequential.

This stylized tale of guilt and retribution is a surprisingly sleek and affecting drama.

A likeable, if somewhat whitebread, farce in the Woody Allen mode about love in the big city.

Puerile, gross and pandering to the lowest impulses of teenage boys.

The young stars have considerable natural chemistry and do their best to make the rehashed material approachable and entertaining while maintaining their kid-friendly images.

Danner, whose Dina actually resembles a human being, would be its saving grace if her gracefully controlled performance weren't lost in a sea of braying caricatures.

A slack combination of faith-based inspiration and broad 'hood comedy.

An aimless and unexciting science-fiction story about a computer scientist, Segal, who undergoes brain surgery and is transformed into a maniacal murderer.

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.

Yet another variation on the theme of Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge." If you've read the short story, you'll see where things are going in no time flat; if you haven't and want to be surprised, don't look it up.

You can't accuse the film of making speed addiction look glamorous, but the freak-show kick is too compelling for it to be called cautionary.

Be warned: the silly songs are damnably catchy, from Gerrit's ode to the seventeen pigeons he keeps on the roof, which he sings while sporting a very tight set of white undergarments, to the rousing "Ja Zuster, Nee Zuster."

First-time writer-director Ryan Shiraki's crude, gross comedy of campus sexual errors might push boundaries better were it not so painfully unfunny.

VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED projects the most basic of human terrors: the fear of group power overtaking individual will is expressed in the children as well as in the government and medical establishment which intervene in the realm of the body by manipulating reproductive decisions.

CAREER OPPORTUNITIES is an entertaining film with interesting characters the viewer can actually care about.

A disappointing hodgepodge of rehashed clichés.

Underlying the slapstick, however, is an extravagant parody of American culture--bad taste, bad manners, the gushing sentimentality of Lloyd's daydreams, or the classic westward road trip, complete with diner scenes and archetypal rednecks.

Newcomer Gregory never captures the mercurial charisma for which Jones was famous (and which Jagger notoriously channeled in his movie debut, "Performance"), without which his story is just another cautionary tale about fast times, intemperate passions and bad dope.

Where else are you going to find an extended riff on the weird, weird world of David Lynch movies, an homage to "The Shining" and flatulence gags in the same place?

As it is, Hard to Kill has just enough going for it between the explosions and bone-crunching fight scenes to qualify as two hours of solid, high-decibel action entertainment.

The greatest hits of '70s bar-rock soundtrack - "We're an American Band," "Right Place, Wrong Time," "Sweet Home Alabama," "Magic Carpet Ride" etc. - has a certain rollicking, kick-ass energy that, unfortunately, never rubs off on the movie.

What chiefly keeps this film on target, though, is Goldblum's marvelously deadpan reaction to all the bloodshed around him. The tone, despite the frequent bloodletting, is light, and the film works better than the script would indicate.

The result is an unpleasant slog to an unrewarding conclusion that feels far longer than it is.

The actors -- especially Klein and Bernthal -- deliver startlingly powerful performances.

This time, the adrenalized formula is even more unpredictable, with twists, turns, curves, and splurges taking the viewer on a rollercoaster ride unlike any other.

The Sisyphean ordeal at the heart of the film strongly recalls Roman Polanksi's 1958 short "Two Men and a Wardrobe," while Lachow's loose, improvisatory approach -- as well as the occasional self-indulgence -- feels more like Henry Jaglom.

Unfortunately the whole thing is less than the sum of its parts, despite a frequently droll script and a great performance from Shandling.

You don't have to be Jewish to love Jonathan Kesselman's uneven, profane and occasionally flat-out hilarious parody of vintage blaxploitation pictures, but it helps.

Jeannot Szwarc's direction is flat and uninspired, emphasizing the jokey elements without any sense at all for the material.

DUNE is visually delightful but choppy, confusing, and overloaded with exposition. Moreover, most of the thematic material that made the novel work--subtexts involving incestuous desire, capitalism vs. environmentalism, and Middle East politics--is simply missing.

Inspired mockumentary-a-clef so clotted with in-jokes that it should come with a crib sheet.

Though positioned as a glum expose of America's violent schools (a cause for hand-wringing at least as far back as 1955's The Blackboard Jungle), the story is overwhelmed by the throbbing score, music-video aesthetic (New York scenes are shot in cold blues and grays, while the L.A. sequences are a hazy, burnt-out yellow) and the exotic, colorful psychos who rule Garfield's classroom: It's a New York Times editorial by way of CLASS OF 1984.

This is a thoroughly conventional story of one man's search for redemption in the neon slime; its multiple flashback structure is just a way of parceling out information, not a device used to undermine the narrative.

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.

Whether this riot of unrepentant trashiness strikes you as tediously ridiculous or brainlessly amusing is probably a matter of mood.

It's way too violent and perversely excessive for many tastes, but there's more to its outrages than meets the eye, and that second look is well worth taking.

Your ability to enjoy G-Force will correlate directly with how funny you find the idea of guinea pigs as action heroes.

Ernest Dickerson, formerly Spike Lee's cinematographer, continues to show promise in the director's seat with this solidly made, well-acted survival thriller that is unfortunately limited by its overworked premise.

The chaotic, brutal iconography of Italian Westerns is put to novel use in this time-traveling, self-referential, hugely ambitious story of American brothers.

Contains striking moments, but never coheres.

A peculiar and oddly haunting achievement.

Hugely smug and annoying.

Aside from the racial twist, this is pretty conventional fare, but it's consistently diverting.

It's well acted and it's entertaining -- and who can resist a movie where Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau are brothers, and Robert Duvall is their dad?

There are effective scenes and powerful performances scattered among long sequences in which various members of the family gaze into space as they contemplate the burden of the past, walk aimlessly through Atlanta or have odd encounters with strangers.

The mere sight of strapping men in micro-mini skirts suffering the indignities of thong underwear, catcalls and pushy pick-up artists is good for a couple of lowbrow laughs, but they're buried pretty deep in dreck.

It delivers some bracingly nasty gore scenes, but there's no spark left in the run-scream-repeat formula, and a movie whose biggest draw is profoundly untalented hotel-fortune heiress Paris Hilton is in desperate need of some juice.

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.

This tale of crime and punishment is wrapped in a veneer of flashy attitude but founders on mundane details.

This ambitious independent feature eschews gore in favor of rubber-reality ambiguity.

It begins with a stale Hitler joke and ends with a miraculous quick-save that demonstrates just how poorly the Holocaust is served by the life-affirming requirements of Hollywood features.

This film will doubtless interest serious anime fans, but it won't win any converts.

If your idea of a good time at the movies is watching two grown men go at it with fists and shivs and nasty wilderness booby-traps, then you're in luck.

Has the distinctive Heavy Metal magazine meets "The Neverending Story" (1984) vibe of Euro-science-fiction comics, complete with ponderous philosophical noodling, weirdly whimsical aliens and seriously creepy creature sex.

In a film in which the star talks graphically about the size of her vagina and ex-lovers appear as themselves to call her a whore, there might be such a thing as too much honesty.

The jokes tossed into this feeble effort involve Cheech and Chong in drag, herpes, and an S&M porno adventure featuring the comedians' real-life spouses Shelby Fiddis and Rikki Marin.

A sprawling, messy, frustrating and impassioned examination of the psychological fallout from America's obsession with a highly artificial and all-but unattainable standard of beauty.

It's a far more interesting film; unfortunately, it's locked inside a maudlin coming-of-age story that barely registers.

This big-screen incarnation of the TV kids' adventure show that spawned a marketing empire is no better than it should be, but it's lively enough to fulfill its primary mission -- which is, of course, to sell more toys.

More of the same, but it's now so far removed from any sense of reality, and done with such ham-fisted insistence, it's become a clumsy parody of itself.

The story isn't much -- the ever-evolving aliens are better served by the cute-but-icky effects than the simplistic script -- but it skims along on the cast's chemistry.

A window into bygone morals and mores.

Buono is truly charming, and the film delivers a handful of genuine laughs -- low laughs, but laughs nonetheless; if only they weren't so few and far between.

Features a nutty mix of broad comedy, romance and maudlin melodrama.

Ukraine-born, American-based filmmaker Andrei Zagdansky's deeply frustrating "documentary essay" examines the Orange Revolution.

At a certain point, its sheer can you top this excess, and credibility files out the window three's no reason to continue paying attention.

A totally unnecessary and extremely poor sequel to the original "Halloween". Although Dean Cundey's photography goes a long way toward recapturing the look of the first film, director Rick Rosenthal is no Carpenter, and the emphasis here is on graphic blood and gore rather than the skillful manipulation of the audience.

THE FISH THAT SAVED PITTSBURGH is about as entertaining and memorable as a sports celebrity Miller Lite commercial.

This somewhat haphazard affair combines witchcraft, feminism, and suburban angst into a creepy whole that is fascinating but not quite successful.

On the plus side, King Kong Vs. Godzilla had a higher budget than most films, and it shows.

This film was a feeble attempt by Hammer to bring some freshness to its series of Frankenstein films by introducing black humor. The jokes are told in such a straightforward, dry manner, however, that you're never sure whether they're supposed to be taken seriously. 

Chase delivers a one-note performance, consisting mainly of predictable comebacks and salacious leers, while the characters who become the targets of his witty rejoinders are weak and silly stereotypes. FLETCH LIVES is a custom-built Chevy Chase vehicle throughout; the other performers are only along for the ride.

Rocky IV is a far cry from the delights (both large and small) of its illustrious original.

This is a one-idea concept enlivened ever so slightly by fleeting moments of Cohen's patented sociopolitical subtext and goofy black humor.

Much of it will probably go right over the heads of kids who aren't familiar with classic movies or the naughtiness of Eddie Izzard.

The perky Aniston is both unflatteringly photographed and utterly unconvincing in the pivotal role of Lucinda, and overall the film has the oddly disconnected quality of '70s Euro-thrillers whose international casts spoke different languages on the set and were dubbed into conformity.

Ichaso tells Piñero's story through a sometimes disorienting series of flashbacks and flash-forwards, fracturing the time frame to suit the film's internal rhythms, rather than any coherent time line.

Performances from the two principals are as developed as the frequently convoluted script allows them to be.

Danish writer-director Ole Bornedal delivers up a stylish thriller whose murky, shot-through-pond-scum cinematography is its most distinctive feature.

The plot of Gleaming the Cube is far from original, but the skateboarding sequences are exhilarating and add a great deal of excitement to otherwise routine material.

A smash success as a stage play, JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK did not translate well to film, even under the sure hand of master filmmaker Hitchcock.

The film's lingering exploration of their sleek surfaces verges on roboporn.

Besides a lot of scenic driving in and around Calgary, Nightbreed does have its fair share of sound and fury, not to mention blood and entrails. But it plays as if Barker were making it up as he went along, despite the film's having been based on his own novel Cabal.

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

However stale the material, Lawrence's delivery remains perfect; his great gift is that he can actually trick you into thinking some of this worn-out, pandering palaver is actually funny.

A shamelessly derivative, if basically likeable, kid's picture.

Your ability to overlook the film's myriad contrivances will ultimately depend on how you react to little De Roma.

But beneath the bombast it's pure paste and tinsel and, robbed of the thrill of live performance, the show's deficiencies are glaringly apparent.

Arm wrestling, truck driving, weird weight lifting, and tear jerking are the stuff of this predictable Sylvester Stallone vehicle in which he plays Lincoln Hawk, a trucker-cum-wrist twister whose son, Michael (David Mendenhall), has been kept from him by his devious, wealthy father-in-law (Robert Loggia).