An uncomfortable go at romantic comedy that belabors the same mistaken-for-gay premise as"In & Out," but without much of that film's charm.

While this version is beautifully photographed and admirably acted, there is never any real feeling of romance or sadness. It is all given a matter-of-fact approach, which doesn't make for a great film.

Writer/director Austin Chick falls into the timeworn trap of making an immature, irritating film about immature, irritating characters.

It may be a simple matter of cultural dissonance, or maybe just a bad translation, but it's hard to see why this obnoxious romantic comedy about a lifetime-long relationship between two mischievous adults locked in an ongoing game of "Dares" was such a huge hit in its native France.

The result is so overloaded with extra characters, tangled story lines, dance numbers, fantasies and flashbacks that the once-simple plot feels puffed-up and irritatingly self-important.

It's all pretty tasteless, but surprisingly chaste and not very funny.

Unfortunately, it is the spirit of adventure that is distinctly lacking in MEMOIRS OF AN INVISIBLE MAN, a dismayingly flat and predictable, special-effects-laden action thriller.

This is the kind of film most of us don't really want to admit we've seen, let alone laughed at. Nevertheless, Ernest Goes To Jail gives Varney fans more or less what they expect, and they keep coming back for more.

There's just no reason why it should take more than two hours for so little to happen.

The Undefeated adds up to nothing more than a weak imitation of many other westerns--paying little or no heed to such issues as originality.

The film's mealy-mouthed messages about feminine empowerment will almost certainly fall on deaf ears, since even 11-year-olds know Spears's power resides largely in her taut torso.

This is essentially a glib soap opera whose main characters are two-dimensional cliches used as clotheslines on which to hang sitcom-level jokes.

As if to prove that light romantic comedy can be just as difficult to stage as Shakespeare, Kenneth Branagh fails at both, simultaneously.

The characters are mostly flat and unoriginal -- - but Pfeiffer delivers a wonderfully villainous voice performance.

Although this entry is competently directed, the series seems to have lost the zip and flashes of wit that made the first Death Wish so memorably repellent.

Its seductive stylishness is undermined by one narrative twist too many; by the time the last revelation has been unveiled with a "But wait!" flourish, the contrivances have entirely overwhelmed the characters.

How much you enjoy the film will depend entirely on how much you enjoy the spectacle of Williams spewing forth streams of nonsensical gibberish in an attempt to impersonate a German record producer, and Crystal pitching snit fits.

If this is your idea of fun, step right up.

The result is rather like eavesdropping on a bright but painfully self-absorbed adolescent's secret thoughts: sometimes fascinating, other times just infuriating.

The cast, including genre veteran Bruce Dern as a kindly lawyer, do their best with the material, but you can't make a crackling thriller out of soggy cliches.

Unlike his brilliant work in directing westerns, Eastwood falls victim to stodgy pacing and ludicrous acting. The Eiger Sanction does, however, contain some brilliant, breathtaking mountaineering sequences in which Eastwood did his own stunt work.

There's way too much of the usual bonding, beatings, petty humiliation by guards, cat fights in the yard and trips to the hole.

Contains several profanely amusing moments, but they don't add up to much.

The premise of LITTLE NIKITA is a great one--worthy of Alfred Hitchcock--but the execution here by director Benjamin is as rickety as can be. About two-thirds into LITTLE NIKITA, the film deteriorates so rapidly that the characters cannot help but fall through the holes. Adding to the frustration of watching this otherwise-promising movie fall apart are the superb performances by Poitier and Phoenix.

Combining an interracial friendship with an age-old love story is certainly a worthy idea, but this poorly executed film is riddled with every cliché in the book and then some.

Can a adorable, freckle-faced four-year-old save an entire movie? Sadly no.

Armstrong gives an annoying, strident performance of her complaining character. The film is devoid of wit, excitement, or interesting characterization.

The complications are predictable, as is the resolution; what keeps the film from sinking into its own inconsequentiality is the throaty-voiced Henderson, who can make the most preposterous behavior ring absolutely true.

The film works best when it's sticking to the guns and poses conventions of macho crime pictures. When it reaches for emotional resonance, the results range from unconvincing to ludicrous.

What a joyless, fussy contraption of a movie!

This film is really blatant right-wing propaganda loaded with a stunning amount of racial and political stereotypes.

Crowe preserves the original film's plot twists and turns, but his version lumbers when it should be whipping along, daring you to keep up. The wall-to-wall pop music soundtrack eventually becomes oppressive, and Cruise's oily smile doesn't really constitute a characterization.

A wildly overblown, unpleasantly smirky mess of a film.

This is really just by-the-numbers moviemaking, the kind of project that would have been made with more zip back in the Corman glory days--if, in that pre-sequel crazy climate, it would have been made at all.

This flashy and ultimately conservative morality tale relies on shockingly frank sex talk to cover the fact that the characters are shockingly poorly developed.

This one has more talk than a Senate filibuster and is only a tenth as interesting.

Clearly, there's the germ of a good -- potentially even great -- movie here, but it's thoroughly smothered by a pair of lazy, self-congratulatory star turns by Hoffman and Travolta.

Added bonuses: A nice selection of oldies on the soundtrack, and an amusing third-act cameo by Rosie Perez as Ray's second wife.

Director Meir Zarchi may have been trying to make a point about the horrors of rape, brutality, revenge, and reprisal, but he simply isn't a good enough director to extract any relevance or nuance from his exploitative material. Watch Wes Craven's Last House On The Left instead.

Despite the impressive special effects, Honey, I Blew Up The Kid offers few surprises. The visual gag of a giant-sized infant is the only real joke the film has and it wears thin in a hurry. The plot is perfunctory and simple, presumably to cater to the attention span of a pint-sized audience.

As a piece of theater, Oleanna's stylized dialogue and strict three-act schematic structure probably worked in the drama's favor; but on film, the techniques are jarring within the naturalistic settings. Mamet, who has written and directed three previous films, should have known better than to preserve the excessively theatrical aspects of his material.

This testosterone-driven, car-crime picture evokes the testosterone-driven, surf-crime picture "Point Break."

If Griffin were a jowly Southern redneck, his mean-spirited rants would make him a pariah.

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

In the long, hit-and-miss career of writer-director Alan Rudolph, this misbegotten comedy falls squarely into the miss bin.

Jelski's screenplay, a finalist in the fiercely competitive Walt Disney Screenwriting Fellowship competition, is repetitive and stagy.

Rymer's film doesn't revitalize vampire clichés in any significant way and, frankly, "Velvet Goldmine" is a more seductive movie about sex, death and rock and roll -- and it's not even about vampires.

Fresnadillo's film is little more than a gloomy and attenuated Twilight Zone episode, reminiscent of Alex Cox's portentous "The Winner" (1997) without the truly breathtaking conclusion.

The homoerotic twists and gender-shifting turns are fun, but they can't hide the fact that the film is little more than a tedious shaggy-dog story with oblique mythological references.

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

Its real star is the picturesque tropical scenery.

Never has the adage "You can't help who you fall in love with" been more lavishly illustrated than in this historical drama.

Steers clear of historical accuracy. Herzog is obviously looking for a moral to his fable, but the notion that a strong, unified showing among Germany and Eastern European Jews might have changed 20th-Century history is undermined by Ahola's inadequate performance.

Perleman has little control over his characters; they simply go to pieces in the most ludicrous ways. He has even less control over Kingsley, who soon slips into full-blown Yul Brynner mode.

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

The shame of it all is that Kane somehow managed to assemble an extraordinary cast, whose fine performances can't surmount the tedium of his script.

Alba, constantly sporting off-the-shoulder tops a la "Flashdance," brings no depth of feeling to her character, and her average -- often wooden -- moves make it hard to believe she's a uniquely talented hoofer and sought-after choreographer.

Overall the film is a stylish lark with no resonance, a mean-spirited one-night stand of a movie.

Home Alone 2 pales next to its predecessor.

Though director Guy Hamilton has tried to make the Christie formula more cinematic by trimming the number of characters and streamlining the plot, the picture is still rather uninteresting. Only the performances, the lovely location, and some Cole Porter tunes make it worth watching.

Don't expect many answers from the movie, for Stone hedges his bets toward the end and vacillates, leaving the whole thing infuriatingly ambiguous.

The film's standout moments include a photographer's (Vittorio Congia) death in front of a moving train; a car chase the streets of Rome; a sequence involving poisoned milk (a clear tip of the black leather gloves to Alfred Hitchcock's 1941 Suspician); and a final rooftop battle between Giordani and the elusive killer. Morricone's music fits tightly into this sophomore suspenser by Italian giallo specialist Dario Argento.

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!

It quickly becomes clear that Nijinsky's disordered thoughts are simply the rantings of a man losing his grip on reality. They're sad and occasionally evocative, but they're not especially interesting in and of themselves, and do nothing to evoke or illuminate Nijinsky's genius.

Sticky sweet sentimentality, clumsy plotting and a rosily myopic view of life in the WWII-era Mississippi Delta undermine this adaptation of an unpublished novel by David Armstrong.

Mines familiar territory and does nothing especially new with it. On the plus side, Kishitani is a spectacular villain.

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

Unfortunately, Flicker wasn't able to rise above the limitations of his microbudget, and his message is compromised by student-film production values and performances that range from adequate to pretty awful.

This simplistic animated feature falls firmly within the long tradition of bland, upbeat and earnest religious instructional films.

The film isn't even enjoyably sleazy: It's just dumb and tacky.

A preposterous wilderness adventure (the kind that makes kids think sneaking into the zoo's bear pit is a cool idea) laid over a touchy-feelie story about good parenting.

You can't help but wish the set up were shorter and the dilemma longer.

Tatou IS adorable, but Michele is a such a brainless flibbertigibbet that it's hard to take her spiritual quest at all seriously, and if you don't feel in your heart that she's really TRYING to grow and mature as a spiritual person, then who cares about her idiotic antics?

The war between highly specific coming-of-age angst and icky-sticky overcoming-adversity cliches eventually brings the whole thing down.

A disappointment that mines the same vein of gross-out romantic comedy as"There's Something About Mary," without that film's oddball charm.

When Prince really performs on screen, he's terrific. If he'd take some acting lessons and team with a competent scriptwriter and director, he might be capable of creating a first-rate musical.

Intermittently amusing, forgettable action spoof showcasing Whoopi Goldberg and helmed by Penny Marshall.

As a debut it holds out the promise that Montias might do something more interesting in his next film.

Lee obviously wants to portray Ethan as something other than the dutiful No. 1 son, but Ethan isn't entirely convincing as a doped-up street hustler.

A movie that looks nice and moves along efficiently, but offers little reason for anyone to watch.

Despite her underwritten character, Mathis easily takes top acting honors with equal parts toughness and tenderness.

Patwardhan offers no solutions, but poses disturbing questions.

Characters lip-synch their dialogue -- badly.

With a wholly derivative concept, confused scripting, and incredibly sloppy direction, THE RUNNING MAN is a frustrating experience.

Is there anything remotely new left to be said about the world's oldest profession?

It's all surprisingly predictable. As for Sorvino, she can wear the clothes, but they don't necessarily make the man.

Favors light action over character dynamics.

Slick and glib when it means to be profound yet ruefully witty; its rhythms are pure sitcom, complete with emotional rimshots.

This ORANGE is a lemon.

Steiger and Ireland manage to give believable performances, but Bronson is unable to evoke a sense of hardness. The direction suffers from too little effective pacing and too much concentration on the pretty scenery.

Director Rick Rosenthal ("Halloween II") seems to have forgotten everything he ever knew about generating suspense, relying on cliched shadows and grainy, handheld images supposedly shot by the increasingly terrified students.

Five people were credited with co-writing TURNER & HOOCH, and rarely have so many labored to so little effect. There's barely enough to make up an agreeable made-for-TV movie in this film.

Finney and Keaton each have their heavy dramatic moments, but there is nothing in writer Bo Goldman's script that hasn't been seen and heard in a thousand other films.

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.

The movie's uninspired animation (including primitive, blocky computer imagery) doesn't help, nor do its astonishingly stereotyped characters.

Pryor--whose customary profanity cuts into the story's essentially sentimental nature--is able to energize the material, but in the end Bustin' Loose remains a minor effort from a major talent.

Noisy and obnoxious, this flashy action picture is so hell-bent on seeming smart that it fairly forces you to think about how fundamentally stupid it is.

Since all these revisited series have run out of steam, this sorry sequel is only recommended for aging nostalgists.