Though less offensive than its predecessor, Rambo III -- which is dedicated to "the gallant people of Afghanistan" -- is still a mindless and uninspired effort.

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.

The film is little more than a stylish exercise in revisionism whose point -- we create, then destroy our own monsters in order to assure ourselves we're human -- is no doubt true, but serves as a rather thin moral to such a knowing fable.

An unintentional parody of the kind of overwrought melodrama Pedro Almodovar once reworked to far better effect.

It's a real shame that the first half hour is a disorganized ramble that risks driving away the film's audience; a little artful editing would have gone a long way to fixing the problem.

The film is hardly profound, but the form perfectly fits the content..

The film is shamelessly presented by Miramax as "The Project Greenlight Movie," and writer-director Pete Jones's big break may ultimately prove a liability.

Overlong and utterly predictable, The Next Karate Kid offers little excitement, even in its culminating fight sequence.

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

Keanu Reeves plays a "courier" with a lot of top-secret data stashed in his brain; it's clearly interfering with his minimal acting capabilities, causing several moments of unintentional (but welcome) humor.

Although the premise of getting or not getting a first driver's license is a solid-enough base for 90 minutes of teenage comedy, License to Drive misses the point on all counts.

The trouble is that if you haven't seen the other entries in the cycle, or don't have all the characters committed to memory, you'll have trouble figuring out who anybody is or, in the end, what any of it is supposed to mean.

The problem with Can't Buy Me Love is that too often characters do and say things teenagers wouldn't. At times this is a funny, touching film, but more often it isn't.

This sequel to David Cronenberg's masterful 1986 remake is uninspired, uninvolving, and wholly unnecessary.

If your tolerance for repetition in genre films is already low, this one will probably push you right over the edge.

It's not a nice movie; like The Exorcist, it is ugly, cynical, and mean-spirited. Yet it's also rendered with the same gripping, unholy conviction that has been Friedkin's "saving grace" throughout his career.

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

Talented though he is, Arkin cannot fill Sellers' shoes, especially when hampered by a script which relies on cheap laughs and lots of accidental death, and Yorkin's pedestrian direction.

A great performance by Barbara Hershey fails to save this poorly directed tale of the supernatural, which was sold as a fictionalized account of an actual paranormal case history.

The picture is very talky, and the gags all fall flat. Director Gilbert Cates was responsible for a number of fine and sensitive films, including I Never Sang for my Father, but stumbles here.

The strange thing about this film is that there are some interesting--albeit half-baked--ideas floating around in the script, and the direction shows some skill and style. However, the plot is ludicrous from start to finish, the characters one-dimensional, and the world-view simplistic.

Handsome and sometimes creepy, but formulaic in the extreme.

There are some decent special effects, but overall it's about what you'd expect from a movie inspired by a line of toys.

The screenplay relies heavily on movieland cliches about the mentally ill being saner than the rest of us, while Kagan's direction is unimaginative and made-for-TVish. Still, appealing performances by Winkler, Field, and Ford nearly compensate for the lack of inspiration behind the camera.

Neither very dark nor particularly funny.

Even by the degraded standards of dim-witted summer blockbusters, this is sorry stuff.

The film is a gorgeous nocturne of surprisingly little substance, a sleek advert for youthful anomie that never quite equals the sum of its pretensions.

It all amounts to something less than an 80-minute Calvin Klein advertisement.

Essentially an extended trailer for the 2008 Cartoon Network animated series.

The film LOOKS great, but at a brisk 88 minutes, there's no time to fill in back story, from the epic history of paladin persecution to the deeply personal mystery of David's mother, and the cliffhanger ending is so abrupt that the movie seems bizarrely truncated.

Not much to laugh about -- or shout about for that matter.

It's not perfect, but PERFECT WEAPON at least furnishes action aficionados with a hero who has a life beyond the floormat of a kung fu school. Speakman may augur a new breed of action hero--a 90s kind of fella who's survived both martial arts classes and sensitivity training sessions. Men will be enthusiastic over his fast footwork; women will be impressed by his ability to carry on an intelligent conversation.

If you enjoyed the robo-spastic ride the first time, then you should be happy with this movie, too. And if you complained that the first movie was trite and lacking in character development, then you probably shouldn’t even be reading this.

A sassy romantic battle of the sexes with a refreshing African-American slant.

Though occasional flashes of the radiantly bi-cultural romp that might have been peek through, writer-director Deepa Mehta's hybrid is strangely clumsy, given that she's an experienced filmmaker familiar with both Hollywood and Bollywood conventions.

As live-action adaptations of cheap, unapologetically stupid cartoons go, this is top of the line: The cast is appealing, the sets brightly colored and fun to look at, the mystery as lame and goofy as any featured in the many inexplicably beloved Scooby-Doo cartoons.

For all its many flaws, the original PET SEMATARY at least maintained a fidelity to its source novel; this one not only ignores the rules set up by the first movie but manages to contradict its own internal and dramatic logic as well.

The film's last 20 minutes devolve into a tedious slog through the kind of pointless, predictable running and screaming that give horror movies a bad name.

Westby's sympathy for the Scottys of the world is evident, but like them he doesn't always know how to put his best face forward.

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.

The car stunts are ridiculous, all lightning-fast editing and computer enhancement -- by the time action is this far removed from reality, who cares?

The movie fails to make Alma a vivid presence -- She deserves better, and so do viewers.

Because the screenplay is more concerned with its formula plot than with character development, neither McCarthy nor Dillon offer any real insights into this theme.

For all its shocking content, it remains a rather conventional psychological portrait of Oedipal attraction taken to a disturbing extreme.

The film is content to relentlessly scream "Boo!" behind the audience's back rather than provide any real thrills.

A hokey monster mish-mash that plunders the richly textured histories of Dracula, the Wolfman and Frankenstein's monster.

Cowriter and director Joel Schumacher keeps things moving, skipping adroitly from one narrative thread to another. Well he should, since it's unlikely any of the subplots could have stood on their own, and very few penetrate deeper into the human condition than the average magazine advertisement.

This flashy fright flick doesn't break any new ground, but puts an attractive gloss on genre conventions.

What's most offensive isn't the waste of a good cast, but the film's denial of sincere grief and mourning in favor of bogus spiritualism. Only devotees of Ouija boards and TV's "Crossing Over" will find anything of merit here.

Bad enough that the plot is shopworn, but the tough-gal talk is unintentionally hilarious, and the complicated narrative structure is annoying and pointless.

Tthough it comes wrapped in a stylish French mantle of feminist rage and sexual empowerment, the picture ultimately belongs squarely in the tradition of rape revenge pictures.

If it were possible for an entire state to sue for defamation of character, Iowa might have a strong case against writer, director and star Matt Farnsworth.

There's no getting around the fact that Ross's whole cynical premise is based on the lurid male assumption that nubile, college-bound teens have few qualms about selling themselves, a fantasy as deluded as the targets of Ross's barbed arrows.

Despite eye-catching sets and smart casting, this first feature-length film to be adapted from a video game is a bloated muddle.

And if you can't figure out who [the bad guy] is the minute he first appears, you've either seen too few movies with mind-numbingly predictable plots or you've seen far too many.

Don't be put off: Hernandez's exquisite romance works on an emotional, as well as intellectual, level.

Freakies fans will swoon.

Though the film gets off to an indifferent start, bogged down by too many talking heads, by the time Cochran plunges headlong into corruption, Scott is operating at something like full throttle.

Levy can't seem to tell if something is funny or not and keeps up the sledgehammer intensity throughout every scene, comic subtlety and timing abandoned in a desperate attempt for laughs--even pained ones.

Meeske does offer insight into a way of life that may be finally gone for good.

Well intentioned but unfocused, director John Henry Davis's debut feature tries to tackle two serious subjects at once: maintaining one's faith in a universe that's seemingly without meaning, and the ways in which scripture is used to justify anti-gay violence.

Sprawling, gooey and profoundly juvenile, this derivative thriller piles on the cheese: aliens, male bonding, psychoanalytic gobbledygook, childhood secrets, military black ops, gross-out special effects, explosions, bodily function humor and a retarded boy with special powers.

Deeply adolescent; its impact is visceral rather than intellectual.

Fun if you like this kind of thing and don't expect too much of it.

Were it not for Kumar's luminous charisma, the film would be unwatchable.

Much of the film is shot from a dog's-eye view, and this technique works perfectly. The human actors are okay but not as cool as the canine star, a veteran of TV's Petticoat Junction series.

Sure, there are a few funny moments here and there with several obviously intended jokes, but director Richard Fleischer never milks the elements of self-parody for what they're worth.

The drug-addled duo of Cheech and Chong dropped all their chemical-inspired jokes for this film, but there are enough scatalogical, homophobic, and perverse sexual gags to fill in that gap...The film is a poorly structured mess with a few sophomoric laughs.

There's not much to this empty-headed feature except that Sheen gives a commendable performance with what little characterization is provided by the lame script.

Not only is this truly sick stuff, but the production is so low-budget, and the photography so muddy, that a sense of ultrasleaze prevails.

Ridiculous haircuts and clothes can't compensate for the absence of real characters, which consigns much of the cast to cameo-like performances.

Infantile, pointless tedium aimed at kids, to whom the fact that it features the entire cast of TV's Power Rangers ZEO will presumably mean something.

The film's most consistently entertaining element is Berkowitz's backer, a shady character named Elie Samaha who never appears on camera. Samaha's expletive-laden harangues, in which he orders Berkowitz to beef up the movie's T&A factor, are priceless.

Adults -- even the die-hard dog lovers -- will just have to resign themselves to being bored silly whenever the cartoonish Cruella is absent from the screen.

Brian Robbins (Varsity Blues) actually has a clear sense of the way 21st-century teenagers behave, and his sleek style keeps the film moving briskly.

Freighted with far more serious issues than most movies of its kind but neglects or glosses over most of them.

Far from Bartel's best exploitation work but worth a look for low-budget cult fanatics.

Actually a marked improvement over the plodding and confusing original.

This violent action is stylish but painfully formulaic, even by the undemanding standards of video-game narratives.

Despite its lack of imagination, this dull martial arts entry spawned two sequels: Revenge of the Ninja and Ninja III--The Domination.

A sweet-natured and refreshingly uncartoonlike look at the trials of an unworldly Midwestern college boy negotiating his freshman year at NYU.

Dumb premises have driven some wonderful romantic comedies, but for all its vaguely mystical trappings, Prywes's film lacks the magic that makes them work.

It's familiar, undemanding and not as bad as it could have been, but you can't help thinking that somewhere else, there's a real party going on.

Marvel-man Mark Steven Johnson, who wrote and directed "Daredevil" (2003) and scripted "Elektra" (2005), continues to demonstrate the wrong way to make comic book movies: Make sure special effects overwhelm the characters, let campy mannerisms go unchecked and be sure dialogue is declaimed rather than spoken.

The game cast does what it can -- it's a good thing Schreiber is naturally funny -- but the situation is hopeless. This is one wreck better left unexplored.

Regardless of his true intentions, Resnikoff has made a screwy horror movie that, despite itself, is fun to watch.

A coarse and unappealing black comedy.

The real problem with the new film, however, is a certain lack of chemistry between the leads; Wilson is game, as always, but his part is seriously underwritten, and while Murphy raises trash talking to the level of a fine art, he seems to be operating in another movie altogether.

This totally sucks.

Director Edwards confused humor with speed; so the pace is 150 mph, but there is no time to laugh even if there were any reason to.

Despite its preposterous storyline, Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dead is surprisingly entertaining and fun. While the film, directed by Stephen Herek from a screenplay by Neil Landau and Tara Ison, might have been sharper, wittier and cleverer, it nevertheless achieves on its own level by genuinely involving its young target audience.

It's a handsomely mounted but poky thriller undone by a fatally miscast lead.

Alas, even the lowest expectations go unmet by FREEJACK, which turns out to be an inexplicably lame, penny-pinched futuristic actioner.

Trying to jump on the PORKY'S bandwagon, the makers of SCREWBALLS came up with another bad, teen sex comedy. The girls are given degrading names, the boys have only one thing on their minds, and the producers obviously have no sense of social or artistic responsibility.

The script is heavy on platitudes about friendship, but since there isn't a single fully fleshed character in sight, who cares?

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.

Overblown, ridiculously contrived drive-in flick.

Writer-director Henry LeRoy Finch's ripely overwrought exercise in Southern Gothic psychodrama, which happens to unfold in a picturesquely decaying house in Maine.