In all, about a third of the film (most of it contained in three extended sequences) is audaciously funny and genuinely disturbing. The rest will sorely test the devotion of Carrey's fans.

It's an action junkie's angry fix -- 130 minutes of sound and fury, signifying nothing but big bucks and boundless contempt for viewer intelligence.

Essentially, this is RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK without the narrative savvy and self-referential cleverness.

This examination of unexamined lives is beautifully acted by all involved, notably former pop diva Deborah Harry, whose nuanced portrayal of a middle-aged tart is almost painful to watch.

Whip together TV's The Invaders and V. Fold in cult classic Enemy From Space and season with a dash of Species. The yield: an agreeable cocktail of paranoid sci-fi conventions that bubbles along energetically, despite surprisingly low-tech trappings

Nielsen's schtick is getting pretty threadbare by now -- his movies used to wring laughs from assaults on his silver-haired dignity, but after years of screen buffoonery, he has no dignity left to assault.

The result is a gracefully plotted spy film in the classic mode, with just enough self-consciousness to keep things interesting.

Even on a purely sentimental level, Free Willy this ain't: The product placements are the most promiscuous in recent memory --perhaps in history -- and all but the smallest children will sense the cynicism underlying this superficially noble shaggy fish story.

Extreme-weather buffs, thrill-ride junkies and anyone else in search of mindless entertainment need look no further.

A slow-paced but hypnotically absorbing movie, it's buoyed by Jarmusch's trademark off-key humor and embellished throughout by an electrifying instrumental score, courtesy of Neil Young.

This tart but fluffy paean to good sense and clean linen is a bracing reminder that the reason the English think they're so clever is that they are -- some of them, at any rate.

Compared to this brash, lunkheaded vehicle for "Baywatch" star Pamela Anderson Lee, the Barb Wire graphic novels are masterpieces of subtlety and narrative restraint.

The feminist subtext here is intentional -- the credits list a Wiccan priestess as witchcraft consultant! -- but any subtlety soon gets lost in the thud and blunder of special effects, trendy music and a predictable Hollywood-style climax.

The film does nothing to demythologize the '60s; rather, it uses prevailing myths as a substitute for critical thinking.

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

Garofalo and Thurman breathe some eccentric life into the cliches, and charming Chaplin is a walking warning to Hugh Grant, almost adorable enough to warrant all the trouble.

Plummer's fearlessness is awesome -- just try to imagine another actress willing to bare so much bony flesh wrapped in clanking chains -- but her character is nevertheless a ranting bore.

Everything looks fabulous, but the fight scenes are stagy, the dialogue stilted, the characters underdeveloped and the tone superficially cynical.

Somehow, Hollywood has managed to reinvent the hard-boiled source novel -- Cornel Woolrich's "I Married a Dead Man" -- as a soft-centered candy of a comedy, and the result is indigestible.

It's not that the heckling isn't funny -- it is, at least sometimes -- but we just can't stand that smug, superior attitude, predicated on the notion that everything that isn't new and flashy is ipso facto ridiculous.

There are some very funny bits, but they're interspersed with long stretches of exposition that drag the whole thing down, down, down.

CELTIC PRIDE supplies predictably lowbrow yocks for jocks, and its rather disturbing racial implications go entirely unacknowledged.

This could have been trashy fun, if it had moved along briskly a la CLASS OF 1984. But it's self-important and dreary, marred by murky cinematography and painfully unconvincing pauses for character development.

It's probably just passable for children, but adolescents won't sit still for this bland mixture of mediocre jokes and soft-core action.

A sober, intelligent drama with surprising integrity.

Testosterone-driven entertainment with a moral, sleekly directed by James Foley.

As you'd expect from Disney, the film's a technical tour de force, with flawless stop-motion animation and some imaginatively realized live-action sequences. What's surprising here is how much of Dahl's misogyny is allowed to surface. James's elderly aunts are unconscionably grotesque.

The sky-high sleaze quotient -- lascivious priests, amateur porn movies, teenage hustlers and institutionalized corruption of every kind -- ought to guarantee fun for all, but heavy messages keep poking through and spoiling everything.