It's not that Bedtime Stories is bad, it's just entirely and thoroughly adequate.

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

Romano is no match for his heavy-hitting supporting cast: Next to the seasoned likes of Harden or Rip Torn, who's hilarious as Cole's campaign manager, Romano's presence barely registers. Aside from the charming Tierney, there are no surprises in Mooseport.

A romantic comedy that's trying its damnedest to be cute and endearing and might be more successful if it weren't built on a foundation of barely-concealed misogyny.

Based on a goofy '60s TV series and aimed squarely at vulgar 10-year-olds (and inner vulgar 10 year olds), this sappy comedy is relatively harmless and occasionally serves up a funny bit.

Air America comes on like a noisy, overproduced sitcom pilot.

The studio certainly needn't hire any brilliant writers; they have only to repeat the plot of the first film in every sequel.

Dash and screenwriter Adam "Blue" Moreno abandon the stone-faced seriousness of the first film for a more playful approach, goofing on gangsta' poses and colorful hood-speak.

Each new installment has become like a visit with old friends who are often annoying and frequently boring, but are missed in some strange way when they're not around.

The film's tone is hard to pin down, especially with the actors dubbed flatly into English.

None of this is especially funny, nor is it particularly exhilarating; at best it's throwaway entertainment.

What a waste. Check out "Breakdown" or Aldo Lado's 1971 Italian giallo "Long Night Of The Short Dolls" for a far better treatments of the same subject.

Sure, the humor is witless and the gags are often inane, but, given the quality of its predecessors, POLICE ACADEMY 3: BACK IN TRAINING has the dubious honor of being the funniest of the series to date.

Loud, stupid and clumsy.

The film starts in midbattle and scarcely slows up--a good thing, too, because the few slack spots are heavy-handed mystical interludes without a trace of humor.

As a director, La Salle manages to sustain a mood of looming menace almost throughout, and as an actor he gets the film's best joke: When his Satan fills out his hospital admission form, he gives his social security number as 666.

This heist flick is far more likely to drive audiences away than catch and keep anyone's interest in the title kid -- or more accurately, kids.

The major irritant is the hyperactive direction by Joe Pytka, a near-legendary helmer of TV commercials who films each scene as if it were the last, with everybody in the frame strenuously choreographed and overly busy.

Once you get past the lengthy, graphic geyser-of-liquid-excrement gag, it's not as irredeemably vulgar as it might have been.

It's by no stretch of the imagination a good film, but it delivers what it promises: naked girls whaling on each other, flesh-ripping zombies and genre stalwart Todd growling and glowering satanically from beneath a mane of dreadlocks - the He-Who-Kills teeth are a nice touch.

Adds little to the annals of werewolf lore. But it's briskly paced and features a couple of clever twists on genre conventions.

First-time feature director Andrew Douglas, whose advertising background is evident in every frame, brings lashings of style but no sense of real horror to the recycled script.

This abysmal "Spider-Man" satire has more in common with the lamentable spate of "Epic" and "Date Movies" than Zucker and Nielsen's truly funny "Naked Gun" series.

This psychological sci-fi thriller was originally made as a 40-minute segment of an unrealized portmanteau picture, then expanded into a freestanding feature. That's probably why it's padded with shots of Olham running down corridors.

Ridiculous, yes, but in an eminently watchable way. Most of the plot twists work surprisingly well, and the frequently naked leads work up some genuine chemistry.

Unfortunately, the emotionally resonant moments between Murphy and Fanning are few and far between; the rest of the film relies on goofy physical comedy -- Murphy takes more pratfalls that any young woman should have to.

LaBeouf somehow manages to turn Kelly's self-centered behavior and irritating character quirks into a sympathetic lead, and the well-written script by newcomer Erica Beeney brings a lot of humor to some very touching moments.

Hauser and Miles go for broke, lobbing their every comic idea at the screen. Some work better than others, and overall tomfoolery like this is a matter of taste.

Boyar's best efforts -- which are quite good -- can't begin to compensate for Guttenberg's grotesque excesses or make the weirdly warm relationship that develops between them convincing, let alone appealing.

Nobody goes to these movies for their comic-book plots, klutzy dialog, or hammy acting--all of which Kickboxer has in abundance. They go for action, and on that level Kickboxer delivers the goods.

The first half of Lover's film is surprisingly affecting...But the film comes apart in its second half, when James' flight triggers a long series of flashbacks to the brothers' childhood.

Harlin's brisk pacing leaves little time for reflection, but the whole house of blood-spattered cards dissolves upon even cursory reflection.

SON-IN-LAW is like too much of Disney's profligate output, undemanding entertainment for undemanding people.

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

The cast is uniformly excellent -- Pryce in simultaneously utterly horrible and a real hoot as the wildly egomaniacal paterfamilias -- but the film itself is merely mildly charming.

Halloween makes fright fans even more tolerant than usual of second-rate horror pictures, and this one still doesn't cut the mustard.

The humor is too adult for children and the plot far too childish for most adults; in fact, everything about the film is really too silly to warrant much consideration.

Lars Von Trier's silly script about a group of pistol packing misfits gets better treatment than it deserves, thanks to a fine young cast and the game direction of Thomas Vinterberg.

The only serendipitous touch is the casting of New York's "quality of life" watchdog, Rudolph Giuliani, as himself.

That rare, unfortunate thing, a total misfire of a movie.

Lawrence -- with the help of Oscar-winning makeup effects artist Greg Cannom ("Mrs. Doubtfire") -- has created yet another prosthetic screen wonder.

Frankly, it's dumb, but no dumber than "Transformers."

A film that pays lip service to some interesting ideas, but is far too concerned with pleasing a large crowd to be anything more than another instantly forgettable fright flick.

Not so much a sequel as a reworking of old nonsense, CLASS OF 1999 is a thuddingly dull B movie that borrows its few thrills from other, more satisfying films.

In a world filled with crude movie sitcoms, Berg's bitter, worst-possible-case scenario really does stand alone.

If it weren't for the running flatulence gag, the whole silly business might be mistaken for slight, clean, fast-moving fun.

So outrageously, unregenerately stupid that you might be tempted to think it's smart. But it's not: It's as dumb as Georgia dirt.

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

Taken as a whole, the film is dragged down by the same old incoherent plotting and characters, driven by the same old half-baked machismo and mealy-mouthed misogyny that have come to define Cimino the auteur. As a result, and despite the efforts of Rogers and Hopkins, Desperate Hours is more than a title; it's a description of a movie-going experience.

None of it really amounts to anything, even as a nostalgic snapshot of a time and place.

Though beautifully acted by Basinger (everyone else is relegated to a supporting role), there's a strange vagueness to much of this sumptuous, stunningly photographed melodrama.

"Saturday Night Fever" with designer drugs and duds.

A pretty little package whose perfect, fairy-tale ending is just a little too neat, the film's colorful wrapping includes veteran actress Carol Kane's bizarre but enjoyable performance as the school's uptight drama teacher.

Director Dennie Gordon keeps the pace brisk, and between makeovers and pratfalls, the girls deliver an easy-to-swallow dose of girl power.

While this flight should have been permanently delayed due to extraordinarily offensive conditions, there are no signs instructing you to remain seated should you decide to discreetly exit before your tour of the unfriendly skies is over.

The only memorable moments in the entire film come courtesy of three supporting characters, dopey skateboarders (Evan Peters, Shane Hunter, Hunter Parrish) who blindly follow Julie around.

Bill Forsyth's films are always idiosyncratic, but Being Human is so steeped in the director's interior dialogue with himself as to be incomprehensible to anyone who doesn't happen to be Bill Forsyth

On paper it looks like a bad idea for a comedy, but on film it looks even worse.

The cast tries but the laughs simply aren't there, despite the filmmakers' apparent conviction that homages plus penis jokes equals wit.

Without an assured character at its center, the movie quickly collapses in a heap of moldy clichés and contrived (and not especially funny) situations.

The sheer force of imagination that produced the film's unique mix of different styles, musical numbers and hipster doggerel is extraordinary.

The second attempt to bring a dark corner of the Marvel comic-book universe to the screen, this comic-book-based revenge story is undermined by its inconsistent tone.

Louise Fletcher is a walking sight gag as the evil principal, but just about every other gag falls flat and lies there, wheezing.

Despite the participation of Moonstruck screenwriter John Patrick Shanley, a fine cast, and director Pat O'Connor, The January Man is a disappointing movie that plays like something that had languished at the bottom of Shanley's desk drawer since his student days.

Director Tony Scott's stylistic flourishes haven't been put to such creepily seductive use since The Hunger.

It might be best to discreetly misplace your invitation to these strained festivities.

If anyone is to blame for this bomb it's Forte: He wrote the thing, and one would assume he's the one responsible for those uncomfortable silences where jokes are supposed to be.

Braff and Bateman have a good, darkly comic chemistry, but there aren't nearly enough moments like the brutally funny, "Murderball"-style wheelchair basketball game to sustain the entire film.

Film is preposterous without being surreal; only at the Tailor's Ball -- which takes place shortly before the end -- does it strike that perfect balance between the bizarre and the curiously mundane.

It's hard to overstate just how awful this movie is, despite the efforts of the appealing cast.

This scattershot comedy (which might be called "irreverent" if anyone actually revered movies like AMERICAN PIE) features vulgar gags at the expense of recent youth-oriented pictures.

In light of the recent plight of real New York City-based filmmaker Micah Garen, who was kidnapped and nearly executed while attempting to make a genuine documentary in Iraq, the whole endeavor seems simply foolish.

A stew of silliness that's so ridiculous it's almost entertaining. Almost.

How engaging you find this loosely structured road movie will depend on how charming you find the over-aged slackers played by Josh Alexander, who also wrote the screenplay, and Robert Bogue.

The film's 85 minutes drag by painfully slowly, because there's no respite from Chapman's tedious, self-pitying reveries.

First-time writer-director Robert Edwards is nothing if not ambitious, attempting to encapsulate the history of totalitarian oppression and misguided revolutionary zeal into a broad, blunt, black comedy.

Yankovic fails to come up with anything new to freshen the stock storyline, and is content instead to let it serve as a creaky showcase for his forte, media parodies. But even the quality of these parodies is inconsistent, with the movie and music takeoffs being obvious and out of date.

Vince and Cesar have been written to evoke equal audience sympathy, so there's no suspense whatsover in the outcome of their climactic match-up, the brutal realism of Shelton's staging notwithstanding.

Not funny at all.

For a teen film to resonate, it has to feel honest, and I Love You, Beth Cooper simply comes off as too paint-by-numbers to achieve any level of emotional authenticity.

For a romantic comedy, this offers few laughs and little tenderness, and mainly evokes confusion with its muddled storyline and inept execution.

Though written by Wes Craven and his son, Jonathan Craven, this is pretty standard stuff: A lot of creeping through dark tunnels with just enough characterization to help you keep track of who's still alive, but not enough gore to really satisfy fans of Aja's bloodbath.

Though Dylan shuffles through the dramatic sequences like a dessicated mummy, the music sequences are strikingly vibrant -- he's never looked worse or sounded better.

With all the glossy sex, you'd be forgiven for thinking Zalman King was directing, except that even King knows you don't need such a ludicrously complicated plot to show pretty people having sex. Each character is so burdened with gratuitous back story that it's exhausting trying to separate the grain from the chaff, until you realize none of it matters at all.

Boasts spunk, imagination and a strong performance from Smallville's very talented Sam Jones III.

Marred by lack of a clear strategy and an over-reliance on audio-visual trickery.

It doesn't meet the minimum number of laughs to qualify as a comedy -- two would have clinched it -- and it's far too asinine to be taken seriously.

The juvenile gags seem aimed at moviegoers who hate the whole idea of independent/art/foreign-language films and the stuck-up eggheads who like them -- so what's the point?

The whole film is plagued by a sense of false, desperate cheerfulness.

Cannibal Women does manage to be on target with its humor from time to time. But there are far more misses than hits as the movie also goes for the corny, the obvious, and the ancient.

Incredibly inept and silly adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs' adventure yarn.

Feature debuts don't come much better than director Robert Harmon and screenwriter Eric Red's sleek, dream-like thriller about a naïve college boy who crosses paths with devil in the flesh after taking a wrong turn on some lost highway.

Ralston gets solid performances out of his cast, and the film has a surprisingly polished look. But in the end, there isn't much to it.

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.

Continuity errors are as numerous as product placements and though shot on location, the movie captures none of London's local color.

STAND ALONE is a repulsive, hate-filled effort that blasphemies the true meaning of patriotism.

A cheesy romance tricked up in cheap sanctimony.

If director Brad Silberling had taken this cast to their natural extremes, he might have delivered a raucously funny sci-fi comedy -- think "Anchorman" meets "Jurassic Park." Instead, Land of the Lost is an utter misfire -- not bad enough to hate, not good enough to remember.