The massive sets and extensive special effects are certainly... massive and extensive. But watching them is like watching the wheels and gears inside a hugely complicated clock: It's interesting and even beautiful, but can hardly be called scary.

It's an amiable, middle-class coming of age story, soft and sweet and ultimately a bit inconsequential.

While both the novel and the film are weighted in favor of Bill's (Cruise) character, it's Kidman who gives the film's standout performance.

It's as chilling as Algernon Blackwood's elegantly unnerving "The Willows," played absolutely, unsettlingly straight.

Smoothly enjoyable, undemanding entertainment and features a couple of knock-out giant croc attacks.

The folks at Jim Henson Pictures have wisely opted not to mess with the late Jim Henson's winning formula; the crowd-pleasing soundtrack features hot '70s funk classics, the Muppets are as cute as ever and there are more than a few flashes of adult humor to keep grown-ups laughing right along with the kiddies.

A successful thriller makes you forget such impossibilities, but here they poison every scene.

Alternately sweet and raucous comedy.

A beautifully realized tale focusing on an ambitious but unfulfilled group of intellectuals, who react in differing ways to the illness that befalls their mentor, a brilliant writer (Francois Cluzet).

A tabloid slice of tabloid life, ragged, vivid, awkward and punchy all at once.

The quintessential cotton candy movie: It's pleasant, brightly colored and the minute it's done it's as though it were never there.

Brilliant, in its own twisted way.

This stage-bound farce could easily be an American sitcom: It's all slamming doors, eavesdropping and stupid miscommunications, garnished with a heavy-handed helping of comedy of humiliation.

It's not nearly as funny as "The Waterboy" and has little of "The Wedding Singer's" goofy charm, but die-hard Adam Sandler fans -- whose numbers are legion -- will find plenty to laugh at.

The result is a confused mess of mixed signals that substitutes a brutal climax for any kind of satisfactory resolution. Parents should be warned about the frequent gunfire and a grisly death by hanging.

The whole lurid business is undeniably entertaining, but it leaves a bad taste.

The film's extra-special trick, the one that kicks in under your radar because it's so busy with all the flash, is that it makes you care deeply for Lola and Manni.

It's lavish, clever entertainment, a welcome opportunity to laugh without shame.

Girard and his collaborators are so focused on the stunning tableaux that all other considerations fall by the wayside, leaving their visual achievements -- miraculous on such a small budget -- mired in the elaborate but maladroit storytelling.

Would be too long even if it were twice as funny. And that about sums up the movie.

In search of inspiration and the human spirit triumphant, they managed to cook up a pot of sanctimonious, reductive claptrap (which the credits confess was only "inspired" by Quinn's book) that's not in the least instructive or entertaining.

Cleverly mixes footage from various recording sessions and interviews with live performances in Amsterdam and New York City's Carnegie Hall.

There's an argument to be made that the film's ending is the logical conclusion of its notion that everyone's trapped in a limbo of disappointment, uncertainty and paralyzing fear of change. But it feels like a cheap cop out: The cast, and the audience, deserve better.

Roberts fans will, of course, be delighted to see her in a role that plays to all her strengths -- fresh-faced looks, charming gangliness, air of infinite approachability -- and neatly sidesteps her glaring inability to act by having her more or less play herself.

Despite earnest performances by Mueller-Stahl, Bierko, Mol and Vincent d'Onofrio (in the duel role of a programmer and a VR bartender), the movie feels like a bit of a rehash.

Aggressively non-linear and heavy on the visual flair, Mike Figgis' allegorical voyage through the mind of a filmmaker alternates between the tawdry, fake sophistication of fancy perfume commercials and an unholy regurgitation of the worst excesses of European art cinema.

Angelopoulos' leisurely pace and trademark long takes add up to a film guaranteed to please filmmakers nostalgic for the bygone glory days of European cinema.

It's a kiddie movie rejiggered for childish grown-ups, of whom there are enough to make it a hit. How such childishness has become a virtual secular religion is hard to imagine.