This sentimental comedy is generally sweet natured.

It's larded with blinding glimpse-of-the-obvious homilies.

SHE'S OUT OF CONTROL would have done far better in the TV ratings than it did at the box office. It has all the production pluses of national ad campaigns: smart art direction, lighting, and costume design; a catchy mix of old and new rock'n'roll on the soundtrack. Unfortunately, SHE'S OUT OF CONTROL also resembles commercials in that it hopes to appeal to everyone and basically endears itself to no one.

Performances are weak all around, and Gordon hits his nadir in his cinematic vision of irregularly sized creatures.

[A]confusing, silly story.

This story, directed and cowritten by Joan Rivers, had been done before and somewhat better by Frenchman Jacques Demy in the 1973 film A SLIGHTLY PREGNANT MAN.

Leave something on the shelf long enough and it'll either ripen like cheese or rot like garbage. Guess what: This ain't Camembert.

This broad, coarse farce is otherwise as insubstantial a piece of work as you could possibly imagine; in fact, a light breeze could blow it away.

Despite the handsome production values and best efforts of the attractive young cast, it's hard to get deeply involved with the frantic "what's going on?" sturm und drang.

A hyperactive hodgepodge.

Ridiculous scripting and frequently comical budget limitations make this film a mostly awful trip to Bruce Lee Land, though the fight scenes, choreographed by Mike Stone, a karate champion and former partner of Chuck Norris, are spectacular and not as silly as the usual Hong Kong product. For fans of the genre only.

The only thing that differentiates this weak offering from a made-for-television feature are Fairchild's nude scenes, which are gratuitously worked in and add nothing to the story.

Chase is a veritable black-hole of mirthlessness who sucks every ounce of fun out what might otherwise be a fairly diverting comedy.

Frenetic and cheerless action aside, the film's real problem is the Cat, who looks most unmagically like a second-string college sports mascot and conducts himself like a risque baggy-pants comedian.

A welcome alternative to such hyperkinetic drivel as Pokémon.

Good-natured fun; it doesn't always work, but it's not for want of trying.

The script, based on a Dark Horse comic-book series, is hugely predictable, but the robot effects by veteran Phil Tippett are nastily entertaining.

Yes, it's really silly, and no, you won't remember a thing about it the second it's over, but adults looking for fast moving, non-violent fun that kids might actually enjoy could do a lot worse.

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.

Like everything else about this insulting romantic comedy, the Jessica Alba/Dane Cook love match is degraded by vile jokes, a boorish attitude toward women and a smutty tackiness not seen since those stupid nudie-cuties of the 1960s.

This is a sort of remake of A Yank At Oxford (1938) without any of that film's charm or humor. Lowe passes off arrogance as a cute personality quirk, and the whole movie plays like just another teen-oriented exploitation effort, replete with sex and booze.

Even Spade's most dedicated fans would probably be better off staying home and watching a "Just Shoot Me" rerun.

Character actress Lin Shaye, usually relegated to grotesque supporting roles in mainstream comedies, is a revelation as Buono's embittered, cancer-ridden mother.

It fails utterly as a horror picture, although it delivers plenty of PG-13-rated flesh and unintentional laughs.

The film's only mildly appealing character is the "Big A" store clerk (Brian Posehn) who refuses to be amused by Lloyd and Harry's moronic antics; sadly, even he eventually succumbs to the film's relentless and overarching stupidity.

Even Bisset has to struggle to keep from looking embarrassed. Sadly, despite these numerous flaws, WILD ORCHID isn't even bad enough to be good.

Routine thriller.

Pop tunes are mixed in with some of the original G&S songs in a pirate period setting that grates on the nerves, as does the inane toilet humor that substitutes for wit. All the performers, especially McNichol, look as if they can't wait until the film is over, and one can hardly blame them.

Whereas Tod Browning showed the warm humanity of such people in FREAKS (1932), Winner cruelly exploits their handicaps for the purpose of repulsing his audience. This alone makes the film detestable.

The tiny, impassive-faced Liu is a disaster. She looks cute in her custom commando gear, but she's not actress enough to make Sever's ridiculous, faux hard-boiled dialogue sound like anything but the formulaic nonsense it is.

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.

Though there's some trashy fun to be had in the film's first half, this cynical sequel -- devolves into space junk even faster than the unfortunate Ross.

Just like many real-life holiday get-togethers with the family, this comedy starts out pleasantly enough but degenerates into awkwardness and furtive watch-checking to see how much longer you have to suffer before you can leave.

The result is 93 very long minutes' worth of admirably committed actors putting themselves through the emotional wringer to very little end.

Bronson does his usual violent-teddy-bear number believably, and the other actors do what they can with the formula script and hack direction.

This big budget mish-mash is almost unbelievably derivative and shockingly cheap looking.

Director Jamie Blanks "Urban Legend" appears to be carving himself a career making slasher movies for a new generation; unfortunately, he's in no way improving on the originals.

Why do moviegoers and gamers keep going to see video-game-based movies when neither group is ever happy with the results?

Not much action or excitement here.

An all-but-incoherent mess whose main components are palpably fake-looking CGI effects, video-game-style action sequences and Milla Jovovich's admirably taut abdomen, Kurt Wimmer's film epitomizes just about everything wrong with post-MATRIX, comic book-/video-game-inspired, Hong Kong-action-style sci-fi thrillers.

The script, by co-writers and -directors Douglas McGrath and Peter Askin, is intermittently clever, but their direction is leaden and assassinates every gag with a lethal accuracy the CIA could only hope to achieve.

Scenes are woefully under-rehearsed, and much of the obviously improvised dialogue would seem entirely random if it weren't so repetitive.

The spectacle of the near-naked Ricki (Lopez) striking sexually provocative yoga poses while floridly extolling the virtues of female genitalia is particularly mortifying, but it's only one of many horribly miscalculated scenes.

POLICE ACADEMY 5 presents a patchwork of ideas borrowed from a score of wittier and better-done comedies, not to mention earlier entries in the series. In short, it's exactly what you would expect it to be.

The effectiveness of this kind of issue-driven give and take relies heavily on casting, and Ritchie puts himself at a disadvantage: Madonna looks terrific in a bikini but she can't act, and the younger Giannini is stunt casting.

The opening half-hour, as Pat and former music video director Bernstein conspire to keep the secret while depicting the banal existence of this truly irritating character, is reasonably entertaining. The remainder of the film has some amusing moments, but the story goes nowhere, and if the film ran longer than its 80 minutes, it would have become too tedious to tolerate.

This trashy, overwrought thriller gets itself worked up into a fine, sleazy lather that recalls the matricidal glories "Die! Die! My Darling!" and "You'll Like My Mother", then wimps out at the end.

The pacing is slack, the comedy has an oddly sour tone and frankly, no matter how hard the script tries to paint Sean as a petty martinet with a stick up his butt, it's hard not to sympathize with him.

This shotgun marriage of coarse laughs and low-rent action cliches is, of course, utterly predictable: Cutting-edge comedy isn't lurking under the corpses of old TV shows.

Surprisingly, Hurley comes off better than either of her demonstrably more versatile co-stars; she's not much of an actress, but she has an engagingly saucy swagger and her open-mouthed expression of outraged disbelief is priceless.

In a year that saw everyone from Burt Reynolds to Michael J. Fox to Schwarzenegger himself handcuffed to six-year-old sidekicks in high-concept cartoons, one could do worse than to exploit the image of a professional wrestler forced to play mom. That said, Mr. Nanny is of little interest to any audience other than pre-teens of all ages.

Some of the humor is pretty raunchy (there are quite a few sex-related scenes and jokes) and tasteless. Adults old enough to appreciate the choice electro-boogaloo soundtrack and get the "Mr. Roboto" jokes will doubtless find the rest of it painfully dumb.

An excruciatingly unfunny comedy.

The direction is lackluster, and the film is padded with a number of useless scenes.

It's hard to imagine who would find this funny.

Instantly forgettable but fun while it lasts, Disney's live-action adaptation of the classic cartoon is an ideal action-adventure thrill ride for kids who may be a little too young for the latest Bond extravaganza.

Nelson wanders through this film like a zombie, and Sheedy, an actress who can manage an occasional burst of talent, is simply bad here. The film's only saving grace is the musical score by Cooder.

A rapper doesn't make the story fresh.

Calling CHILDREN OF THE CORN II a better film than its predecessor is something like damning with faint praise, but this sequel manages to be somewhat less ludicrous and occasionally a little more chilling than the first film.

Well over $20 million was spent to create a film full of sound and fury but without an inkling of intelligence.

It's a forgotten piece of history worth recounting. One only regrets it wasn't better recounted than it is here.

Loaded with ridiculous scenes, silly dialog, and gratuitous violence and nudity, REFORM SCHOOL GIRLS tries very hard to exploit the genre while poking fun at it at the same time. The only problem here is that little is funny.

A preposterous misfire.

Hippolyte subsequently reinvented himself first as a director of baroque erotic thrillers and then as music-video maestro to pop tarts like Britney Spears, but stalk-and-slash horror -- for all its porn-movie rhythms -- appears to have defeated him.

The Duffs are certainly cute together, but not even their natural chemistry can enliven all the preachy bits about hard work and the meaning of happiness.

This one may be just excessive enough to develop a cult following. It also proved quite popular with German audiences, for reasons we've been unable to fathom.

The dramatic scenes are frequently unintentionally funny, and the action sequences -- clearly the main event -- are surprisingly uninvolving, especially given that director Christian Duguay is an extreme skiing buff who habitually shoots dangerous stunts himself.

The movie is flat, often pushy, and has none of the bubbling joy of the SCTV sketches that Candy and Levy illuminated with their presence. Set pieces are tossed in every few minutes in a vain reach for laughter; but under director Lester's sloppy hand, there is very little to laugh at.

There's something special about this underwhelming mess of a Street Fighter reboot that many cinematic cheese-lovers will find very appetizing. The fact is that The Legend of Chun-Li is not at all a good flick, but it's filled with so much cornball ineptitude that one would think some rather broken mad movie genius was behind it.

Formulaic to the core, this reworking of the fondly remembered high-school slasher picture works surprisingly well on its own terms.

There are some amusing moments early in the film, as Lattanzi's friends try to teach him about sex as only teenaged boys can.

The action scenes are poorly staged, the frights predictable, and the generally competent cast appears at a loss to make anything of the substandard material. Gabe Bartalos' makeup for the leprechaun is actually quite good, but his efforts go for naught.

Satanic silliness undermines this gloomy horror picture.

Unless you grew up in an Italian-American neighborhood like the one featured in this contrived but pleasant enough comedy, you might not know that "chooch" is slang for jackass, a likeable loser who can't help but screw up.

Another worthless sex comedy.

Though many characters are dispatched in various gory ways, the film gives them more to do than the have-sex-and-die victims of past entries. Director Adam Marcus and writers Dean Lorey and Jay Huguely give them some personality, and the acting is also generally better than in the previous Fridays.

Overall the movie is too stupid to offend any but the most sensitive viewer.

The sadists responsible for the painfully unfunny "Date Movie" (2006) are back, and this time they've outdone themselves: This theater-clearer is even less amusing than its terrible predecessor, a spoof so devoid of laughs it can longer be categorized as a comedy.

No one expects much from movie adaptations of TV shows but complete incoherence and boredom is a bit too much to bear.

A dreadful remake of the French farce LE JOUET (1976), THE TOY is poorly written, over-directed, and filled with sophomoric attempts at humor. Only Richard Pryor's personal energy manages to save it from being complete rubbish.

The most shocking thing about this ludicrous serial-killer shocker, released the week troubled 21-year-old former child star Lindsay Lohan was arrested on DUI and cocaine-possession charges, is that it's the kind of film actresses generally make when their careers are well and truly on the skids.

Muddled tale of demonic hijinks and devil worship. It's terrible.

On the plus side, POLICE ACADEMY 6 is skillfully photographed by Charles Rosher, Jr., and has a very good soundtrack, supplied by Robert Folk. Unfortunately, high production values are wasted on films this slow-paced and silly.

The film should have featured more absurd and nonsensical elements. Certainly the plot is ridiculous, and so completely illogical that to see it fall by the wayside in favor of some inspired lunacy would not have been a loss.

Though Kiser makes the zombified Bernie equally funny, WEEKEND AT BERNIE'S II spends too little time with him, and too much getting bogged down by subplots: two mob pawns' bumbling attempts to steal Bernie's corpse; Hummel's tailing Larry and Richard through St. Thomas, only to be arrested time and time again; Larry's failed romance with an island native whose physician father is, conveniently, versed in black magic; and Richard's being poisoned by the voodoo queen.

Preposterous plotting and interchangeable young actors.

The air of low-budget Eurotrash is unmistakable. Almost everybody has an unidentifiable accent.

The plot is simply an excuse for a string of good-natured dope jokes (come on -- you have to love that their hookah is called Billy Bong Thornton) and goofy sight gags inspired by everything from Jerry Garcia to Jerry Maguire, most of which are undoubtedly funniest if you're eight miles high.

There's a germ of an interesting idea here, but it's smothered by gloomy cinematography a la "Seven" (1995) and grating implausibilities, like the fact that everyone lives in the kind of cavernous, dankly art-directed dumps that only internet millionaires and trust fund twinkies can afford in the real New York.

Director Scott Kalvert returns to wring every last cliché out 1950s juvenile delinquent movies, without adding anything particularly fresh to the formula.

The real trouble is Jack: He's narcissistic and tough to like (Pontevecchio's fine, but a younger actor might not have brought an impression of arrested development to the character), and his crude sense of humor borders on the disgusting.

To make up for the lack of blood, the film provided more gratuitous nudity than had been seen in the previous installments of the series.

Beverly Hills Cop III is a flat-out action comedy in which the action is unimpressive and the comedy so mild it seldom hits the mark; for a series only into its third installment, Beverly Hills Cop III is shockingly toothless.

Harlem Nights isn't the embarrassing vanity production it might have been, there's still not a lot to be said for it.

Penn and Madonna both do a fine job with their roles, the supporting roles are excellent, the direction is passable, the camera work and art direction are accomplished, and the script mindless and predictable. There's nothing to create outrage, and there's nothing to stimulate excitement, which is probably why there was no substantial interest in SHANGHAI SURPRISE.

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 fish-out-of-water buddy/action comedy is aimed squarely at undiscriminating 10-year-olds, and that demographic may well enjoy it.

Criticism seems irrelevant at best.