Though less offensive than its predecessor, Rambo III -- which is dedicated to "the gallant people of Afghanistan" -- is still a mindless and uninspired effort.

The surprise is that you won't hate it nearly as much as you expect -- thanks to a solid supporting cast, a cute cat and an even cuter Ricci -- and the manic pace will have the kids purring with delight.

The film is little more than a stylish exercise in revisionism whose point -- we create, then destroy our own monsters in order to assure ourselves we're human -- is no doubt true, but serves as a rather thin moral to such a knowing fable.

An unintentional parody of the kind of overwrought melodrama Pedro Almodovar once reworked to far better effect.

It's a real shame that the first half hour is a disorganized ramble that risks driving away the film's audience; a little artful editing would have gone a long way to fixing the problem.

The film is hardly profound, but the form perfectly fits the content..

The film is shamelessly presented by Miramax as "The Project Greenlight Movie," and writer-director Pete Jones's big break may ultimately prove a liability.

Overlong and utterly predictable, The Next Karate Kid offers little excitement, even in its culminating fight sequence.

This vulgar, supposedly comic horror tale about vampire hookers and religious morons is just plain gross.

Keanu Reeves plays a "courier" with a lot of top-secret data stashed in his brain; it's clearly interfering with his minimal acting capabilities, causing several moments of unintentional (but welcome) humor.

Although the premise of getting or not getting a first driver's license is a solid-enough base for 90 minutes of teenage comedy, License to Drive misses the point on all counts.

The trouble is that if you haven't seen the other entries in the cycle, or don't have all the characters committed to memory, you'll have trouble figuring out who anybody is or, in the end, what any of it is supposed to mean.

The problem with Can't Buy Me Love is that too often characters do and say things teenagers wouldn't. At times this is a funny, touching film, but more often it isn't.

This sequel to David Cronenberg's masterful 1986 remake is uninspired, uninvolving, and wholly unnecessary.

If your tolerance for repetition in genre films is already low, this one will probably push you right over the edge.

It's not a nice movie; like The Exorcist, it is ugly, cynical, and mean-spirited. Yet it's also rendered with the same gripping, unholy conviction that has been Friedkin's "saving grace" throughout his career.

As if to prove that light romantic comedy can be just as difficult to stage as Shakespeare, Kenneth Branagh fails at both, simultaneously.

Talented though he is, Arkin cannot fill Sellers' shoes, especially when hampered by a script which relies on cheap laughs and lots of accidental death, and Yorkin's pedestrian direction.

A great performance by Barbara Hershey fails to save this poorly directed tale of the supernatural, which was sold as a fictionalized account of an actual paranormal case history.

The picture is very talky, and the gags all fall flat. Director Gilbert Cates was responsible for a number of fine and sensitive films, including I Never Sang for my Father, but stumbles here.

The strange thing about this film is that there are some interesting--albeit half-baked--ideas floating around in the script, and the direction shows some skill and style. However, the plot is ludicrous from start to finish, the characters one-dimensional, and the world-view simplistic.

Handsome and sometimes creepy, but formulaic in the extreme.

There are some decent special effects, but overall it's about what you'd expect from a movie inspired by a line of toys.

The screenplay relies heavily on movieland cliches about the mentally ill being saner than the rest of us, while Kagan's direction is unimaginative and made-for-TVish. Still, appealing performances by Winkler, Field, and Ford nearly compensate for the lack of inspiration behind the camera.

Neither very dark nor particularly funny.

Even by the degraded standards of dim-witted summer blockbusters, this is sorry stuff.

The film is a gorgeous nocturne of surprisingly little substance, a sleek advert for youthful anomie that never quite equals the sum of its pretensions.

It all amounts to something less than an 80-minute Calvin Klein advertisement.