The cast is unusually good for this sort of film, which only makes the poor execution more regrettable.

Vastly overrated Crooks-R-Us--this time you wear the moustache, enhanced by fine period trappings and flavor. Ultimately empty stuff, but preferable to "Butch Cassidy."

Director Ridley Scott's visual gifts are still evident in Black Rain. But with retread plot and characters, Scott's stylistic flourishes become irritating clutter.

Highly derivative of Night Of The Living Dead and filled with amateurish performances, strained comedy, and zero production values, Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things does convey, nonetheless, an undeniable power in the rising-dead scenes and a genuine mood of unease throughout that most big-budget horror outings fail to capture.

The surprise is how tame and passionless it all seems, particularly after director Philip Haas's fevered "Angels and Insects."

The phrase "Everything happens for a reason" is heard more than once, a risibly simplistic cliché that not only stands as this film's hackneyed theme but also as a surprisingly honest confession as to just how calculated the entire film is.

Uncomfortable hodgepodge of poignant fantasy, showbiz satire and crime thriller.

Splatterpunk novelist-turned-screenwriter David Schow and director Jeff Burr take the material back to its roots, re-creating the minimal plotting and alternately muddy and washed-out look of the original. In deference to contemporary tastes, Leatherface pulls as few gory punches as prevailing standards permit (Texas Chainsaw Massacre only seemed unbearably graphic) and underscores the mayhem with an abrasive speed metal soundtrack.

The film boasts slick production values and a charmingly modest turn from the charismatic Barrymore, but it's too trifling and uneven to be a good date movie.

Formulaic but surprisingly affecting drama.

If you were watching it at home you wouldn't feel compelled to pause the film before going into the kitchen to fix a snack.

The skating photography is excellent and, like the documentary's soundtrack, songs from the Stooges, Blue Oyster Cult and the Weirdos set the proper mood. But this dramatization does nothing Peralta's documentary didn't do better.

The film's worth as a propaganda piece was considerable, but too many long-winded speeches about people uniting to fight the Germans date the film somewhat now.

Though the performances are surprisingly good - the characters are drawn with a broad brush, but the actors, almost all professional comics, hit all the right notes - the material just isn't funny enough to justify the film's length.

Yes, it's a testosterone cocktail, but at least it doesn't leave you feeling as though you've been tumbled around in a gem polisher for two-and-a-half hours.

Occasionally marred by purple narration; it's also a mite sloppy in terms of time-passage and geography. Yet its mythic characters feel like genuine, hurting human beings.

Cinematographer Alain Dostie's stunning, painterly cinematography is the best -- and perhaps only -- reason to endure this stunted epic.

The film is relentlessly peppy, often quite funny, sometimes a bit too convinced of its own adorableness and ultimately as smoothly reassuring as a TV sitcom.

Director Furie's stylistic method of dwelling on certain scenes, a penchant for close-ups so large and exasperating as to blot out the screen and confuse the vision, worked effectively in his Ipcress File, but here his shots of teeth, guns, horses' eyes, Brando's jowls, and Comer's brow are merely specious, distracting, and as amateurish as a TV director shooting into the sun for reflection or allowing water on the camera lens to remind the viewer that technicians are present.

Casting Caine as Austin's father is a stroke of pure genius.

Predictable but sometimes moving.

The performances are rough and sometimes amateurish, but that works in the film's favor more often than it doesn't -- there's none of the false slickness that comes with hot young actors playing rock 'n' rollers.

It's not as if Fighting is terrible. The acting is well done, as is the unique look at the underbelly of the Big Apple.

Stiller's performance throws the whole enterprise out of whack -- he's a grotesque mass of tics, twitches and swaggering macho shoulder action.

The film is beautifully made and thought-provoking, but vacillates too much between the sentimental and the metaphysical.

An oversized National Georgraphic special whose images of the Nile and Egyptian ruins are absolutely breathtaking on the oversized IMAX screen.

Relying mostly on slapstick visual humor (only 15 words are spoken, otherwise the dialog is all grunts and groans), the action quickly becomes madcap.

A disappointing, quickie follow-up that vainly tries to imitate the look of the original on an obviously limited budget, and for the most part, eschews the philosophical, social, and racial subtext of the first film in favor of straightforward shoot-em-up action and comic-strip characters.