A tightly scripted cautionary tale about what happens when the lights go down in Southern California, hiding behind a generic action-thriller title.

This formulaic comedy is a real kid-pleaser, full of spitballs and slapstick mayhem. Most adults will be squirming long before the heartwarming finale -- what a drag it is getting old.

Indifferently directed and almost aggressively tedious, we'd call it cliched if they'd even bothered getting the cliches right.

Bright cunningly translates the story of Little Red Riding Hood into the trashy vernacular of tabloid TV and reality-based cop shows.

It's also pretty funny -- certainly more so than the first film.

But this $3.5-million rehash -- about the brothers Fitzpatrick and their troubles with girls -- is a real turnoff: smug, smarmy and utterly unconvincing.

As the barbaric Montgomery, who helps bring out the beast in the beast-men, Val Kilmer raids the closet of sinister mannerisms and tries them all on for size. Poor David Thewlis is in another movie entirely.

You can almost feel writer-director Ron Shelton praying for lightning to strike twice, but to no avail.

Director Tony Scott's stylistic flourishes haven't been put to such creepily seductive use since The Hunger.

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

Schnabel at least manages to tell a fairly coherent story. The bad news: It's not a very interesting story, and Schnabel doesn't have the chops to make it one by sheer strength of filmmaking prowess.

Francis Ford Coppola falls down and goes boom with this depressing, ill-conceived comedy.

Good, dirty, escapist fun.

For Hartley, the third time is definitely not the charm.

The movie is a genteel, witty soap opera designed to make everyone feel the better for having not only seen it, but having had a bit of fun.

Director Andrew Davis (THE FUGITIVE) punches out the action sequences with frightening efficiency, and The Fugitive Guy keeps things moving -- so fast, in fact, that it's easy to get lost in the tangle of conflicting conspiracies. The whole breathless business feels as though it should be over about 15 minutes before it is.

Tran's film is a startling achievement: brimming with moments of exquisite tenderness and shocking brutality -- sometimes simultaneously -- and each invested with an almost perverse beauty.

A Time to Kill seems to argue that America's racial problems aren't so bad because, even in the heart of bigoted Mississippi, a black man can get away with murder.

Captures the way drug addiction gives structure and purpose to aimless lives, and evokes the breathtaking rapture of a fix. All this and a happy ending, too.

A high-wire spook show without a net -- half the fun is watching it teeter between the tastelessly amusing and the unforgivably gross.

If the very idea of another movie about a bunch of overprivileged thirtysomethings and their relationships has you reaching for your revolver, Nicole Holofcener's winning debut feature will come as a pleasant surprise.

Despite the obvious potential for comic disaster, the results are only intermittently amusing. Keaton's Kinney is such a selfish, lemon-lipped wet blanket, you can't help wishing he'd been diminished a little with each cloning, until there was nothing left of him at all.

The aliens, meanwhile, are a fabulously nasty lot of slimy, tentacled, malevolent telepaths, but all their superior technology is no match for our red, white and blue ingenuity. Take that, space bullies!

In time-honored Hollywood fashion, PHENOMENON suggests that smart people are friendless freaks who'd be far better off if only they were just as dumb as the rest of us.

This remake of Jerry Lewis's 1963 Jekyll and Hyde comedy is slackly directed and overloaded with flatulence jokes.

Director/writer Andrew Bergman has a proven flair for screwball humor, and you can still discern traces of the lighthanded romp Striptease might have been if Moore hadn't reshaped the project to accommodate the formidable dimensions of her ego.

The film stumbles a bit towards the end (some deeply rooted conflicts are implausibly resolved), but terrific performances from a large cast -- particularly Elizabeth Pena as Sam's childhood sweetheart -- smooth over the rough spots.

Derivative and utterly implausible, ERASER is big-budget action filmmaking at its dullest.