While handsomely mounted and generally well acted, the film is undermined by long stretches of awkward, obvious dialogue and by the vagueness of Lisa's revolt against the status quo.

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.

Despite excellent performances all around, the actors can't overcome the script's limitations.

The year's most eagerly anticipated green-eyed monster finally rears its ugly head, not with his trademark radioactive roar, but a deafening yawn.

Hudson and Wilson share a natural and easy chemistry that helps compensate for the Cuban-mobster subplot.

The result is sheer, unadulterated nastiness with no apologies.

This movie is a compendium of every element in every inane teenage movie you've ever seen. The only reason anyone would watch it would be if they were being punished or were suffering from a heretofore incurable case of insomnia.

Ippoliti's sharp cinematography helps salvage this below-par production.

In all fairness, there is a lot of camp value here. Fans of truly bad cinema couldn't ask for a sillier big-budget production--envisioned with the utmost seriousness.

Director Hyams tries desperately to evoke the feel of the best of the 1940s wartime romantic dramas but, despite solid performances from the leads, his screenplay is predictable and trite, leaving the audience little to look forward to.

Despite several bad or indifferent performances, though, the film does succeed in its primary goal, to provide 90 minutes of fast-moving and fairly exciting action.

For a family-friendly holiday comedy, it's still coarse, formulaic and occasionally just plain weird.

Melodramatic look at alienated California high school students.

Sexist, plot-hole-riddled movie equates women with cows and men with bulls.

Although not what American studios generally mean by "family fare," this drama is actually excellent family viewing -- it both opens a window onto another culture and, through Antonio, speaks the universal language of teen angst.

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

The premise of TROOP BEVERLY HILLS might have worked as a comedy skit, but could hardly sustain a feature, and unfortunately the premise is virtually all the film's screenplay supplies. The lack of character development is particularly damaging for Long--since her character never becomes more than a cartoon, her reformation is never credible.

The plot is simple, allowing Polanski great freedom to play with his characters and to give his audience rousing fight scenes. Although the film is a bit slow and talky in spots, it fills the long-ignored gap in Hollywood-style swashbuckling pictures.

While the homeless, the mentally ill and the generally downtrodden are scattered about like so much shabby furniture, Rifkin has no qualms about wallowing in their filth, but he misses the tragedy of their lives -- just as he misses everything else.

With scenes that must surely rank among the most revolting ever committed to film.

The Country Music Channel's first foray into feature filmmaking is sickly sweet and thoroughly predictable, and woefully underuses veterans Harper and Reynolds, but it features some stirring performances, including BeBe Winans and Willie Nelson dueting on "The Uncloudy Day."

Even worse than its hypocrisy, gratuitous homophobia and cheap proselytizing, the movie is dull.

The film continually leans towards intelligence and even poignancy but then gives way to pretty pictures and nonsensical fluff.

The downside is that it all feels like a big in-joke, and you're not in on it.

The lame and apparently tacked-on ending (which seems to crib footage from 2000's "Gladiator"), suggests the rather terrifying prospect of a Roman-era sequel. Five words: Be afraid, be very afraid.

This one makes De Niro's recent film "15 Minutes" look like "Network." Even worse, aside from a few scenes with Shatner, it just isn't funny.

There's no denying the freak-show appeal and you don't see frontal nudity like this on TV, but otherwise it's all as contrived and artificial as "Survivor."

Take out the weak acting and what's left in this sequel to Enter the Ninja is a fairly good display of martial arts.

If you can't spell "bogeyman," you shouldn't make movies about him.

Trying to appeal to both old and young audiences, the movie ends up shooting itself in the foot.

Raunchy.

It's hard to care even just a little when you have no idea what's at stake or why, be it Heaven or Hell.

Filled with holes big enough to drive a train through and moments of suspense that prove false alarms, the story concerns two young people (Shields and Chris Atkins) who are shipwrecked on an island, develop a sexual relationship as they mature, and so forth. At a little over 100 minutes, the film feels as if huge chunks of it were edited out for pace; however, the wrong chunks have been cut.

For a movie of its type, Max Payne is a little short on excitement and heavy on pathos.

"Queer as Folk's" Peter Paige makes a strong debut as a writer/director with this original black comedy.

Simultaneously nakedly formulaic and oddly clumsy, particularly in terms of character introduction.

For all the casual terribleness it records, it is entertainment; the characters are real and fleshed-out, and we care about what happens to them.

Forget about social significance, depth of character and complex thematic underpinnings, and repeat after me: "It's only a werewolf movie."

It's somewhat more energetic than the previous year's Breaking Training, and the Japanese locations are a plus, but so much silliness has been substituted for the solid situations and characterizations of the original that it's hard to believe the same people had anything to do with both pictures.

The first film featured George Wendt from TV's "Cheers"; this time around, they tapped the same TV show for John Ratzenberger.

MANNEQUIN TWO is breathlessly funny and blessedly unassuming comedic nonsense.

That the 27-year-old Usher isn't much of an actor is no surprise, but he's strikingly uncharismatic for someone who's been in the spotlight since he was six.

An aesthetically contemptible, crassly commercial work.

Runs out of story a good half hour before it runs out of spooky images, but it comes to a quietly chilling conclusion far more haunting than any bloody mayhem.

When a performer as sharp as Cedric the Entertainer is reduced to funny fat-guy shtick, you know you're in the presence of grinding mediocrity.

Amusing and at times uproarious.

The film vacillates between inanity and flat-out lameness, and the decision to recut from an R-rated version to a PG-13 sucked out whatever life might have been left.

Todd Komarnicki's screenplay relies heavily on red herrings and a host of suspects (there are more murderers swanning around Hill's sleek offices than there were aboard the Orient Express) to keep audiences distracted from what, in retrospect, is really pretty obvious.

The huge cast seems to share in the sense of confusion, and what might have been an excellent treatment of an important story merely falls flat.

Shock-rocker Rob Zombie's loving homage to flat-out nasty horror films of the 1970s will leave many post-"Scream" (1996) horror fans cold because of what it's not. It's not slick or glossy. It's not funny or self-referential.

Though the story eventually runs out of steam and it's never clear why the night-crawlers torment certain children and then come back to get them, fledgling screenwriter Brendan William Hood and director Robert Harmon -- whip up some effective suspense sequences.

THE HUNTER is more dead than alive. Supposedly based on a real bounty hunter's life, this episodic film never focuses on anything long enough for the audience to care about it, and characters race in and out of the story without introduction or development.

What was a subtle farce when directed by Yves Robert in French becomes an overstated comedy here, with all the actors hamming it up to no end.

This imitation of the classic AMERICAN GRAFFITI is set on Halloween night, 1965, when a group of teenagers decides to get back at the grown-ups for closing down the main drag street in Beverly Hills. Gags involving urination, obscenities, and racism are included in the fun; ripoffs from GRAFFITI include the sabotage of a police car and a disc jockey who plays tunes all night long.

The only really good thing that can be said about REPOSSESSED is that it makes Exorcist II look like a classic. To hell with it.

The only bright spots are Cavanagh's easy charm about him and Cumming's performance as Grody -- he's much more believable as a straight man than Graham is as a gay woman.

Thoroughly preposterous on every level.

Acouple of well-earned laughs but ultimately overstays its welcome.

A painfully claustrophobic picture.

Ironically, the filmmakers seem to think the audience for this movie about super-smart people is super-dumb.

The hyperactive Hong Kong action stuff is getting old.

As slasher films go, this is about average. The sets are cheap, with most of the budget seemingly going to the gore effects.

Unforgivably bad, painfully unfunny, and downright stupid, HEAD OFFICE tries to do to the corporate world what AIRPLANE did to the airlines. A needle in a haystack would be easier to find than a laugh in this film--which is surprising, considering that the cast includes such names as DeVito, Moranis, Novello, Doyle-Murray, and Shawn.

A thoroughly uninvolving picture, THE PRESIDIO is chiefly the victim of a horrendous screenplay by Larry Ferguson (BEVERLY HILLS COP II; HIGHLANDER). When it isn't providing mundane dialog, Ferguson's script assaults the viewer with senseless exposition continuously dredged up from the characters' pasts.

The dialogue tries to give Godzilla some higher meaning, but it doesn't know what it wants that to be.

It's familiar stuff if you've sampled the vast body of work devoted to LA-dammerung.

A smug comedy about a precocious child who teaches his deadbeat dad about the true meaning of family, GETTING EVEN WITH DAD is only occasionally funny and commits every sin in the sitcom lexicon.

Tepid action picture that fails to live up to its interesting premise.

Dry, dull, and terribly predictable.

Black comedy requires perfect pitch: Pedro Almodovar has it and cowriters/directors Michalis Reppas and Thanasis Papathanasiou don't, at least by the evidence of this film.

A handsomely produced but unintentionally risible film that mistakes high grotesquerie for high gothic.

Levinson, who has directed enough films to know better, should recognize a stinker of a script when he smells one: Instead clever laughs he serves up sloppy schtick, dead spots filled with lame ad-libbing and Walken crooning "The Happy Wanderer."

This vapid, mean-spirited comedy is Lopez's show, and though she is utterly unconvincing as a paragon of down-to-earth virtues, the last laugh was hers from the outset.

The picture is dull and the pacing abrupt rather than quick. STICK might have been a good movie about 20 years ago, before people became sophisticated and demanded depth in characterization.

Less pretentious than John Milius' Big Wednesday, North Shore is pleasant enough but not very engaging.

Thank God for Brooke Shields: Spitting spite with every remark she hurls at her long-suffering mother, she's a revelation.

The truth of the matter is that, given the thoroughly manipulative, red-herring plot twists that get her to the happy ending, most audience members will have ceased to care about whether she lives or dies long before the matter is settled onscreen.

Keaton and Holmes have some sweet father-daughter moments and the supporting cast gives its all.

Jackman and McGregor are a delight to watch.

Routine military melodrama leads to a satisfactorily explosive climax. But what makes Birds truly riveting entertainment is not the conflict between good and bad guys, but the clash between the film's apparent intent and the loony subversiveness of its performances.

Seriously undermined by its sour tone and an unusually charmless performance by star Chris O'Donnell.

Sitting through this charmless romantic comedy is like going to a restaurant and being seated next to a drunken couple who argue throughout dinner: It's messy, embarrassing and absolutely none of your business, but there's no escape.

It's just plain lurid when it isn't downright silly, and that "drunk cam," a blurred, cockeyed lens through which Sonny's soused point-of-view is shown, is just a terrible idea.

The cliched plot and unconvincing action sequences -- don't blend well with the comic scenes and make the film look painfully cheap.

Though the premise has at least the potential to be funny, TRAPPED IN PARADISE is an indigestible blend of smart-ass TV sketch comedy and syrupy sentimentality.

Indistinguishable from any of the He-Man TV episodes or videocassettes in any aspect other than length, which is probably a moot point at best. This is a ground-out effort designed to please the calculated expectations of He-Man's loyal audiences.

No Holds Barred is paced well, with broadly drawn good guys and bad guys. Somewhat problematic is the murky status of the wrestling fans in the film. The "goodness" of Hogan's character is so markedly contrasted with the grossness of the wrestling-bar patrons that the film actually appears to be criticizing its star's fans--who are, after all, also the film's audience.

Highlander 2 is beautiful. But it's largely incoherent. The film is desperately overplotted; events and years rush by and pile up like cars in an interstate wreck. It's also terribly overexplained.

Filled with implausibilities and unintentionally funny moments, this early Norris feature was little more than an excuse for the actor to use his karate skills. Exploitative in nature, but popular with its audiences.

Still passable popcorn fare, even if you'll barely taste it before swallowing.

There's about half an hour's worth of sickly amusing material here...Unfortunately, that leaves a solid hour's worth of witless screaming, running around and expiring in a welter of icky special effects.

The film's greatest asset is Linney, whose prickly, finely calibrated performance as the doomed Harraway makes her loss resonate more powerfully than any of the point-counterpoint rhetoric.

Ryan Schifrin's first film is a pleasant surprise, an old-fashioned monster movie that relies more on genuine suspense than bare breasts and blood.

Sorry excuse for a comedy.

Andreas' cast and crew, however, have done an admirable job of backing up that hilarious title with an intelligent little film that knows its limitations and makes the most of a shoestring budget.

Francis Ford Coppola falls down and goes boom with this depressing, ill-conceived comedy.

For all its maturity - and nice performances from Johnson and Phoenix - the film winds up dancing around the 500-lb gorilla in the middle of the room rather than facing the pathology of its real subject head-on.

For the first hour director Arau and his co-writer and wife, actress Arizmendi, negotiate the story's tricky mix of comedy, social satire and science fiction with surprising aplomb.