All things considered, Grumpy Old Men might have fared better re-worked as a domestic drama that took full advantage of its talented cast, with the lame funnybone attempts left, like the ubiquitous dead fish, buried in the backseat.

The first-rate cast is lost at sea.

Despite the obvious potential for comic disaster, the results are only intermittently amusing. Keaton's Kinney is such a selfish, lemon-lipped wet blanket, you can't help wishing he'd been diminished a little with each cloning, until there was nothing left of him at all.

Hit-and-miss.

Director and cowriter Niall Johnson's black comedy falters at the end, but until then it manages to wring gentle humor from murder most well bred.

Lisa is no mindless run-of-the-mill ripoff. Closer to a true homage, it has a style and wit all its own in the hands of Sherman, who, after a decade of turning out such minor genre gems, continues his career as one of Hollywood's most underrated directors.

While there are a couple of genuine laughs here, this AIRPLANE!-style collection of gags and blackouts is strangely sour and ultimately wearisome.

This is a shameless, straightforward soap opera (no Almodovarian excess here!), but it's pretty entertaining on its own sudsy terms.

Piper Perabo is a revelation -- and Barton is maturing into a sensitive, subtle performer with a marvelously expressive face.

And while the divas make their characters hugely entertaining, they're also such high profile actresses in such a soft-edged film that it's hard to actually worry about what's to become of them.

The resulting awkward, earthbound mishmash thoroughly overshadows Judd and Kline's authentically moving performances.

It comes as a huge disappointment, then, that having cast Witherspoon as Miss Sharp, director Mira Nair and Oscar-winning screenwriter Julian Fellowes (Gosford Park) were unable to resist that impulse to find 21st-century prototypes in 19th-century literary characters, fictional creations whose values lie not in the way they reflect our own narcissistic times, but the way they reveal so much about their own.

Johnny Suede's stylish, dreamlike mood and abstract dialogue cannot compensate for its unsatisfying storyline and characters.

Bad Boys is disturbing, sometimes annoying, often painful, and never boring. Writer Richard Dilello and director Richard Rosenthal have taken a difficult subject and infused it with interesting people, some wit, and a lot of careful thought.

Anyone who grew up in the Brooklyn of the 1950s will recognize the essential honesty of this picture.

This one combines elements of AMERICAN GRAFFITI, GREASE, and PORKY'S with a liberal dose of TV's popular sitcom Happy Days.

Fairly effective action-horror film.

Palindromes read the same way backward and forward, and Todd Solondz' sour tale ends where it begins.

It's ultimately hard to care deeply about a silly, sheltered girl-woman who's taking an inordinately long time to learn that money can't buy happiness.

A feature-length Twilight Zone episode, filtered -- not entirely successfully -- though the sensibilities of David Lynch and his Wild at Heart collaborator, Barry Gifford.

To his credit, writer-cinematographer-director Peter Hyams (RUNNING SCARED) doesn't pretend he's reinventing the wheel here--he just sees to it that all the pieces are in place and that there aren't too many opportunities for the premise to trip over its own implausibilities.

Like most contemporary romantic comedies, the film's plot works only if you accept that everyone behaves like a complete and utter idiot at all times.

Zeffirelli's production is neither high art nor lowbrow pandering, but something in between.

"Charlie's Angels" director Joseph McGinty Nichol (aka McG) shows surprising restraint with this emotionally freighted material, weighting the movie heavily towards relationships.

Essentially, this is RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK without the narrative savvy and self-referential cleverness.

But this $3.5-million rehash -- about the brothers Fitzpatrick and their troubles with girls -- is a real turnoff: smug, smarmy and utterly unconvincing.

A lavish parody of/homage to Hollywood big business comedies, The Hudsucker Proxy is gorgeous but lifeless, a very small joke writ very large by the talented but perversely insular Coen brothers.

Photographed as harsh spectacle in brown and gray with unfailingly overcast skies, the story is affecting and suspenseful enough when focusing on Vassili, the humble peasant youth, and his patrician adversary playing a chess-like game of cat-and-mouse.