If it's conventional, it's also competent. Thanks to director Charles Stone III (of the famed "Whassuup?!" Budweiser spots), the clichés at least have a good beat.

As spent screen series go, Star Trek: Nemesis is even more suggestive of a 65th class reunion mixer where only eight surviving members show up -- and there's nothing to drink.

Stereotypical, banally written bloodbath.

Though the picture falls apart whenever the two leads aren't on screen together, you can argue that That isn't that inferior to its predecessor.

Whereas last year's exemplary "Sexy Beast" seemed to revitalize the British gangster movie, this equally brutal outing merely sustains it -- though with occasional twists that do linger in the memory.

Even at its best, Adaptation is one of the movie year's most esoteric outings -- more so than even Paul Thomas Anderson's far superior "Punch-drunk Love." Too smart to ignore but a little too smugly superior to like, this could be a movie that ends up slapping its target audience in the face by shooting itself in the foot.

The martial-arts sequences take this prosaic thriller to a higher level.

Myopic Whitey, continually passed over for a lifetime achievement athletic award, bears a passing resemblance to Columbia's all-time No. 1 animated star, the nearsighted Mr. Magoo. It's nice to think that if he ever went to this movie, he wouldn't be able to see it.

Soderbergh does a fine job creating a moody atmosphere of pervasive anxiety. The ending can be interpreted a few different ways and should ignite debate about its meaning.

Though the plot ends up taking some potentially compelling twists, its telling always feels manipulative.

Dead-on as entertaining eye candy, a bona fide guilty pleasure -- for the first hour. But the movie loses steam and the sequences that dazzled in the beginning get overshadowed by the excesses of later scenes.

Anyone who pays to see it will certainly feel as if he has been clipped.

It is at once warmly humanistic and boldly innovative, raising philosophical questions but not answering them.

This is intelligent grown-up entertainment on both a political and a humanistic level.

Has its moments -- and almost as many subplots.

Steven Seagal's acting style is so minimal that we can almost believe a script that tells us that his character's near-death experience left him flatlined for 22 minutes.

The rap sequences are shot and edited with the excitement of a crisply broadcast sporting event, which in a way they are.

Glossy or not, the movie is unflinchingly tough-minded, down to its Hollywood-weepy ending, which, if you think about it, may be the year's gloomiest.

It tries hard to be sexy, mysterious and dangerous, but ends up laughably inscrutable.

An innovative -- if only moderately entertaining -- spin on Robert Louis Stevenson's classic Treasure Island.

If you value your time and money, find an escape clause and avoid seeing this trite, predictable rehash. The 90 minutes could be better spent doing holiday shopping.

I cry for I Spy— or I would if this latest and laziest imaginable of all vintage-TV spinoffs were capable of engendering an emotional response of any kind. Comas are physical, not emotional.

The final third is slower until a somewhat contrived finale that's still the funniest thing in the movie.

It's too bad that this long-awaited movie didn't go further than faithfully re-creating Kahlo's artwork and her studied look. Her passionate and tragically short life (she died at 47) is ideal Hollywood material, but the audience is left wanting a more in-depth portrait.

Holmes, of Dawson's Creek, will be up the creek if she can't avoid movies like this. And so will you if you see it.

Grimly claustrophobic movies can make viewers put up a shield, yet Tim Blake Nelson (who directed O) invests this unusual Holocaust drama with dramatic intensity that in no way cheapens its subject matter.

Anything goes, though director Ronny Yu keeps the idiocy on a fast pace.

Too many threads are left dangling and the movie ultimately proves too implausible to put alongside those horror classics.