Stanzler's ideas about the psychic legacy of 9/11 are so confused -- that by the time he unveils the final plot twist, his film has lost every shred of credibility.

Crafting this crude, noisy remake of Disney's first live-action comedy required the labor of no fewer than five screenwriters.

It's a bit of 60s idealism wedged in what basically looks like a hip-hop music video.

This lively and nicely timed comedy has plenty enough, farce, slapstick and even drawing-room humor.

Boyle's movie jettisons much of the telling detail; it has the shambling rhythm of a shaggy dog story and so simplifies the characters' ethical dilemmas that it's hard to care what they do.

The film founders during a series of uncomfortable scenes involving Biggs and DeVito, whose performance verges on painful caricature, but Ricci is adorable and delivers Allen's sharp dialogue with real flare.

This is the kind of movie in which a dozen bad guys with an automatic weapon in each hand couldn't hit a lake if they were standing at the bottom of it, to steal the screenplay's best wiseacre remark.

Cutting Class does a nice job of concealing the killer's true identity, even as it leaves a trail of clues pointing to him. However, this sloppily directed, indifferently written black comedy fails to create sympathetic characters or even deliciously nasty ones.

Medicine Man tries hard to be a film for all tastes, but it ends up appealing to none.

While the film is shot in shades of gray, the drama is played out in black and white.

Added bonuses: A nice selection of oldies on the soundtrack, and an amusing third-act cameo by Rosie Perez as Ray's second wife.

An uneasy mix of B-movie scares.

Affleck is no more convincing as a flesh-and-blood action than as a superbrain, Thurman is cruelly photographed and director Woo appears to be imitating his own worst work.

Director Forest Whitaker, who appears to have been typed as a female-friendly director in the wake of "Waitinh to Exhale's" runaway success, drags out the already painfully slow proceedings with syrupy dissolves, slo-mo sequences and redundant flashbacks, underscoring it all with an intrusively obvious country soundtrack that matches lyrics to emotions with cringe-inducing exactness.

This lowbrow romp doesn't even have the courage of its own infantile grossness.

Without the gloss of novelty, the film's underdeveloped characters and thin -- though busy -- story are forced into the foreground, and its 88-minute running time feels far longer.

In KILLER KLOWNS FROM OUTER SPACE a potentially interesting genre-warping concept is turned into a merely dull and repetitive one by the Chiodo brothers, who created CRITTERS.

Under direction that can only be described as scatterbrained by choreographer-turned-director Kenny Ortega (NEWSIES), HOCUS POCUS runs off in so many directions at once that it keeps tripping over itself behind a plot that doesn't make the slightest bit of sense.

While this version is beautifully photographed and admirably acted, there is never any real feeling of romance or sadness. It is all given a matter-of-fact approach, which doesn't make for a great film.

Coppola's awkward screenplay never finds its tone -- or perhaps it deliberately evokes the pulp conventions of WWII adventures, horror films, weepy melodrama, psychological mysteries and superhero origin stories as a way of evoking the fundamental artificiality of the cinema. Either way, it never comes together into a cohesive whole, and is seriously undermined by Roth's morose performance.

The whole thing is fun for 11-year-olds of all ages.

The acting is flat, and the scientist's ideological speeches too bluntly designed to mirror post-9/11 rhetoric. But there's a dreamy fascination to the iconic images of machines fighting a perpetual war for the human creators they'll inevitably outlast.

All the characters are cardboard, and the actors fail to bring anything extra to their roles. Simply put, this is just a bad film.

The film's greatest incidental pleasures are its supporting players. From Curry, who plays the loathsome Richelieu with his usual gusto, to De Mornay, who clearly relishes her role as one of history's great femmes fatales, to the dryly menacing Wincott and the luminous Anwar and Delpy, there's always someone or something of interest to watch in this passably entertaining remake.

While the master is at work, there are laughs galore, but the film nonetheless constitutes cheap exploitation of the memory of a man who convulsed audiences for years.

Hugely ambitious and driven by Julianne Moore, Samuel L. Jackson and Edie Falco's fine, intense performances, Richard Price's adaptation of his own sprawling novel about a racially charged kidnapping that turns a volatile New Jersey town into a powder keg tries to tell too many stories in too little time.

The downtime between deaths has never been duller, and the Rube Goldberg-type death scenes are so poorly staged that it's difficult to figure out what's about to happen and to whom.

Distinguishes itself from other such projects by dealing less with the event itself than its devastating aftershocks.