Cruz's willingness to allow her appearance to be so degraded for cinema's sake doesn't really help.

Queen Latifah's warmly formidable presence drives this amiable but poky comedy.

The non-professional actors do their schmaltzy best with Gatlif and co-writer David Trueba's sparse dialogue and what appears to have been Gatlif's very limited direction.

Its excellent cast, including Walter Pidgeon, Joan Fontaine, and Peter Lorre, play rather predictable characters, but the film boasts some captivating special effects and sets.

Gets off to a pretty intriguing start before degenerating into a series of routine action sequences.

If you pitch your expectations at an all time low, you could do worse than this oddly cheerful -- but not particularly funny -- body-switching farce.

Toothless satire punctuated by the occasional biting gag.

Overblown, ridiculously contrived drive-in flick.

Based on a goofy '60s TV series and aimed squarely at vulgar 10-year-olds (and inner vulgar 10 year olds), this sappy comedy is relatively harmless and occasionally serves up a funny bit.

It's all too mawkishly life-affirming for words, the sort of film that wins Golden Globe Awards for its tear-jerking sincerity. And you thought -- hoped? -- they didn't make movies like this anymore.

In light of the recent plight of real New York City-based filmmaker Micah Garen, who was kidnapped and nearly executed while attempting to make a genuine documentary in Iraq, the whole endeavor seems simply foolish.

The filmmakers created an animated version of the writer to accompany audio clips of Dick speaking. It's a well-intentioned but unsatisfying invention, which pretty much sums up the whole enterprise.

Norman Jewison's honorable but stodgy exercise in ethical outrage, based on Brian Moore's acclaimed 1996 novel, fairly aches to be called a thinking man's thriller.

Overall, though, the film drags at 91 minutes, filled with dead air that should be crackling with pulp energy.

The plot's contrivances are uncomfortably strained, and ultimately your reaction to its featherweight story of love and serendipity will be determined by how charming you find the dithering, slack-jawed Janice.

Lurches queasily between ghastly broad gags and oddly engaging, character-driven laughs born of clashing cultures and expectations.

Simultaneously sober and silly horror picture.

The lame gags keep on coming and the mystery is both blindingly obvious and needlessly complicated.

The film has all the pregnant pauses, exaggerated reaction shots and melodramatic scoring of an overripe telenovela, but, unlike a good soap opera, the sisters' separate story lines are clumsily balanced.

Most of the film's humor derives from smug anachronisms (the Brit-pop soundtrack, Wang and Roy's use of modern slang) and jokes about bad English food, teeth and weather that were old when Victoria was a girl.

There's not an original thought in sight — the story is Evil Dead in a movie theater — and it doesn't pay to give much thought to the self-referential implications of the story: The demons and their gross-out antics are the main event.

The dialogue flows a little too thickly in an awkward attempt to find a parallel with the then-raging Vietnam War; Hale, a TV veteran, directs loosely, but the few action scenes he does permit are snappy and scary.

It's not a total shock when this gay romantic comedy suddenly veers into to heavy S&M, non-consensual sex and suicide.

The kind of movie for which the term "video baby-sitter" was coined.

The idea is more interesting than the screenplay, which lags badly in the middle and lurches between not-very-funny comedy, unconvincing dramatics and some last-minute action strongly reminiscent of "Run Lola Run." Great soundtrack, though.

Neither very dark nor particularly funny.

It's just plain lurid when it isn't downright silly, and that "drunk cam," a blurred, cockeyed lens through which Sonny's soused point-of-view is shown, is just a terrible idea.

Foxx is a charmer, and he makes Alvin's unlikely evolution from relentless hustler to reasonably solid citizen believable, and even rather touching.