Horror buffs looking for a novel twist on genre formulas should look elsewhere, but this body-count potboiler about a sinister video game and the poor dopes who make the mistake of playing it is the movie equivalent of junk food: It's not good, but it's predictable and even satisfying, in a low-expectations way.

The kids will love all the visual gags in this pleasing if lightweight Disney film.

This relentlessly depressing film biography boasts a moving performance by Jessica Lange as Frances Farmer, one of the most beautiful movie actresses of the late 1930s and early 1940s, shown here as the victim of a forceful mother (Kim Stanley) and a tyrannical studio system.

Sweet and sort of cute -- watch and see if it doesn't kind of sneak up on you.

While it may not be "Citizen Canine," Rise of the Lycans tells its tale competently and without the derivative nature of its predecessors.

A leaden excuse for family entertainment, loosely inspired by Jules Verne's 1873 novel, coarsened almost beyond recognition and dominated by Jackie Chan's comic martial-arts schtick.

Kilmer slips in and out of a series of ludicrously elaborate disguises, some more convincing than others, while poor Shue shuffles through the role of a sexy, book-reading babe pretending to be a dowdy lady scientist in kneesocks.

A reasonably entertaining way to kill an hour and a half.

Smarter and more engaging than it has to be.

An attempt by director Bogdanovich to capture his great love of early movies in a full-length motion picture.

The conclusion, clearly meant to feel ambiguously poetic, is distinctly unsatisfying.

Such a glorious cast, deployed to such trivial effect!

In the end, it all remains a dramatically inert set of talking points, and not even the high-caliber cast can make much more out of it.

The entire movie is one big build-up to a twist that, while not exactly cheating, plays is an awfully cheap trick.

This film's rhythms suggest nothing so much as a weirdly macho telenovela, full of family drama, isn't-it-ironic humor and maudlin twists of cruel fate.

The look is overpowering enough to delay--though not forever--examination of the plot, which has to pull a fast one at every turn to keep moving and which eventually makes a mockery of plausibility.

Although director Rosman spices up the predictable murders with some stabs at surrealism, a slasher movie is a slasher movie is a slasher movie, and this one soon wears out its welcome.

Unfortunately, Defending Your Life suffers from a slushy-headed pop fever.

No Small Affair, while nothing special, at least doesn't resort to the usual teen sex-fantasy cliches and gains more points for what it isn't (sophomoric) than what it is (occasionally touching).

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

Smith has changed a few plot points around to keep readers who already know the secret of the ruins guessing, and to some extent the strategy works. There was, however, no reason whatsoever to change the book's perfect endings.

Attempting to force the story into a romantic comedy template compels Marshall to gloss over the disturbing aspects his characters' disabilities, frequently forcing Ribisi and Lewis to act the part of noble fools.

The film's characters, computer-animated over motion-caputure footage of flesh-and-blood performers, are as blank-eyed and rubbery-looking as moving mannequins -- the stuff of nightmares, not dreams.

Overall, rookie director Ross stumbles over the material, neither destroying nor enhancing the talents of O'Toole, Clark, and company.

But it's all done with such high style and whizzes along at such an exhausting pace that you probably won't have enough time to notice how little you care.

Regardless of his true intentions, Resnikoff has made a screwy horror movie that, despite itself, is fun to watch.

Predictable but pleasant fluff.

A heavy-duty mediocrity, sluggish, unwieldy, and instantly forgettable.