Looks set to unsettle as many conservative auds as it will delight nihilistic film buffs.

Although uneven and too deliberately obscure in meaning to be entirely satisfying, result remains sufficiently intriguing and startling to bring many of Lynch's old fans back on board for this careening ride.

Only intermittently bright. Too much homage to Yank musicals and comedies point up the lack of polish.

As a series of action set pieces, the movie is frequently gripping and always highly watchable. However, when the movie strays into weirder territory --- where, one feels, Jeunet's heart really lies --- there's a growing feeling of inadequacy.

Too slim to make much impression outside fests, this nevertheless reps another solid outing by former art director Huo Jianqi.

Well cast, engagingly played and directed with a stylistic pedal to the metal, Human Traffic is a lot of energy adding up to very little.

An undemanding dramedy.

Ferrario has fun with antique footage and exhibits from the museum, but there's a lack of urgency or sufficient charm to engage.

The film's total appeal may be undercut by a script that rarely feels inspired.

All the trappings of an energetic, extreme-sports adventure, but ends up more of a creaky "Pretty Woman" retread, with the emphasis on self-empowering schmaltz and with the big-wave surfing that gives pic its title seemingly an afterthought.

A minor affair, a confection based on dalliances and the way a set of sophisticated theater people handle them, that lacks true distinction.

May score higher with parents than the kids they bring in tow. Writer-director Tim McCanlies' ("Dancer, Texas Pop. 81") feel-good celebration of youth and old age enriching each other is carefully leavened with humor.

Visually glorious and sometimes moving, but comes coated with a thick hoarfrost of irony.

Takes plenty of liberties with the material and never generates much genuine excitement, but provides an agreeable ride without overloading it with contemporary filmmaking mannerisms.

Cheesy homage to a level of horniness Austin Powers could only imagine will be a dream movie for many a teenage boy.

Paper-thin plot serves as a pretext for rousing gospel numbers in The Fighting Temptations, which straddles styles and eras to get everybody's toes tapping.

The picture comes up short in several departments, notably in pacing and in giving a strong sense of why this man became such a legend.

Replete with smart, capable characters and crimes so bizarre that they lend the film a suspiciously lurid nature, this tony suspenser is hampered by the presence of a villain who is all too obvious from the very beginning.

The picture's constant forward movement and breezy sense of amusement about itself provide a certain mild sort of diversion.

The sense of evil overkill is entirely representative of the picture itself, which repeatedly looks ready to blow all its fuses due to sensory overload.

Makes its points effectively, but could have benefited from a burst of creativity.

Small children who will accept it as rock-'em, sock-'em excitement with a touch of gender-specific empowerment, and hipper teens and grown-ups who can appreciate the whole thing as a semisatirical hoot.

Thanks to amiable lead performances from Miranda Otto and Rhys Ifans, this not very original Aussie comedy about a man making a fresh start in life is a pleasant enough time-waster.

Takes a notorious true story about a loyal soldier-turned-bank robber, and pumps it up into charged if uneven entertainment.

Compensating for the technical faults is the writer-director's unmistakable and undiluted need to express the issues he feels are at the heart of his community.

This year's kinder, gentler "Animal House."

With the combination of mobster characters and heavily R&B, hip-hop and disco/soul tune orientation of the soundtrack, pic has a more streetwise feel than most animated fare, which is not to say that it has street smarts.

All smoke and mirrors. With his third straight excursion into the supernatural, M. Night Shyamalan has begun revealing the hand that works his spooky tricks so much that the lack of substance is plainly seen.

A fairly sustained barrage of broad undergraduate humor and gross-out gags that should tickle young auds looking for unsophisticated laughs.

Egoyan's pedantic, lecturing approach makes the film a bit of a slog, although the basic material has an intrinsic interest that makes one at least want to know more about the historical events.

One of the more absorbing and palatable entries in the rather disreputable "Death Wish"-style self-appointed vigilante sub-genre.

Each of the talented thesps has some good moments, but, ultimately, none can rise above the limitations of the material and filmmaking.

While this John Singleton-directed sequel provides a breezy enough joyride, it lacks the unassuming freshness and appealing neighborhood feel of the economy-priced original.

The vulgar, obvious humor of Zucker brother David and "South Park" creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone elicits easy, guilty laughs, yet the material has an underlying innocence that's just shy of good clean fun.

May be too grisly to extend its appeal beyond its fan base.

A sporadically funny romantic comedy with all the dramatic plausibility and tonal consistency of a TV variety show.

David Koepp's script, from the Michael Crichton novel, is schematic and largely predictable. There's an obvious threat and not too many ways to quell it. Underneath the technical virtuosity is a standard chase film, and director Steven Spielberg does little to elevate it dramatically.

A generic suspenser that doesn't taste bad at first bite but becomes increasingly hard to swallow, The Saint comes off more as a pallid imitation of Paramount's Eurothriller "Mission: Impossible" than as anything resembling the further adventures of Leslie Charteris' charming rogue.

Though it isn't the entirely original creation "Metropolis" was, Bebop is more satisfying.

The film sways awkwardly back and forth between prickly humor and pathos, rarely ringing true in either register.

An unembarrassed, high-octane demonstration of the virtues of a U.S. military with a mission, the latest war pic from 20th Century Fox -- a studio with a proud tradition in this field -- couldn't be better timed to fit the popular mood.

The real problem is Malkovich's Valmont. This sly actor conveys the character's snaky, premeditated Don Juanism. But he lacks the devilish charm and seductiveness one senses Valmont would need to carry off all his conquests.

An unabashedly old-fashioned entertainment loaded with traditional dancing and music.

Unlikely to draw new fans but destined to please followers who couldn't catch the live act.

A curious amalgam of the visually striking, the dramatically feeble and the offensively sadistic.

Just two weeks after successfully targeting boys with "Holes," Disney is giving girls something they want with this mild, quasi-romantic romp.

Second time round, Bridget is still fat, funny and endearing -- but "all a bit, um, familiar, actually."

Holding the film together are simple but strong B&W visuals of offbeat types sitting around a table smoking and drinking java while they talk.

Offers a largely satisfying mix of broad slapstick, seriocomic sentimentality and mostly amusing satirical thrusts at easy targets.

Superficial but entertaining new pic offers equal parts freshness and kitsch appeal set to a pulsating Latin soundtrack.

An engagingly rambunctious toon Western that likely will attract herds of family auds, if not multitudes of teens and tweeners, to megaplex corrals.

Documentarian Jessica Yu employs everything from animation and voiceover thesping to archival documents and eyewitness accounts while examining Henry Darger, a self-taught artist who has been posthumously lionized as a visionary genius.

It plays, rather, like an old-fashioned, by-the-numbers drama that solidly connects with most of its well-worn cliches.

Shamelessly sappy and emotionally manipulative, Patch Adams is an aggressively heartwarming comedy-drama that may be roasted by critics but embraced by ticketbuyers.

Another "remake" that merits the title in name only, The Stepford Wives isn't the "troubled" disaster that media reports have suggested it might be, yet nor do its oddly matched parts ever congeal into a fully formed creation.

Deliberately unvarnished shock piece designed to give pause to anyone with a daughter approaching teenhood.

Feels too piecemeal and ultimately inconsequential.

An intriguing but only partly successful co-mingling of film noir and sci-fi.

A mellow, stately, contemplative study of a stoic, brave man, but it doesn't deliver in the action department.

Writer-helmer Gurinder Chadha assembles a gallery of broadly played stereotypes into a movie about social attitudes that's more rooted in small-screen sitcom than anything deeper.

More interested in finding fresh ways to stage execution scenes than in finding meaning behind the human urge for self-appointed righting of wrongs, (the film) is stuffed with effects that have no lasting impact.

Despite a sensationally attractive cast and an array of well-staged combat scenes presented on a vast scale, Wolfgang Petersen's highly telescoped rendition of the Trojan War lurches ahead in fits and starts for much of its hefty running time, to OK effect.

Won't linger in the memory long, but gives pretty good action eye-candy while it's going.

Peter and Bobby Farrelly aimed low and grossed millions with "Dumb & Dumber," so it shouldn't be surprising that Kingpin, their latest effort, offers a similar mix of pratfalls, gross-out gags and jokes about bodily functions. This time, however, the humor is darker, edgier and occasionally, even more scatological.

What makes the film involving and enjoyable in its first hour is a thick, multilayered plot, a rare sight in mainstream movies nowadays.

This inconsistency of direction is the most obvious fault of Bonnie and Clyde, which has some good ingredients, although they are not meshed together well.

Atkinson, who is in almost every scene, boasts a full-on comic personality that on the cinema screen is a bit daunting at times, and it's an open question as to whether the Carrey crowd will go for this seriously eccentric Brit.

The film's persistent skimming from one vantage point to another, with no dominant dramatic line until midway through, will unsettle audiences expecting a more regular construction and something on which to hook their emotions over the long term.

Yet while Schumacher has largely accomplished the goal of delivering a cinematic comic book, he's also left the movie hollow at its core -- a distinction that may not trouble Saturday-night audiences but that nonetheless dulls the film's impact beyond its sheer and unrelenting visual grandeur.

But the film also has its turgid, dialogue-heavy stretches, and the leading performances, if acceptable, are not everything they needed to be to fully flesh out these elegant immortals.

After lightly going through the motions of a plot, it all ends up in the quarry, where assorted machinery provides the excuse for a parade of slapstick gags and amusement park-like predicaments that seem mostly lumbering.

The only problem is that the great majority of screen time is devoted to the kind of loutish, drunken, small-minded, confrontational macho posturing that, in assorted ethnic stripes, has been paraded across the screen innumerable times in recent years.

It is unfortunate when such a difficult, ambitious film doesn't quite pay off after building up so much solid credit, but that is the case here. It is possible that the nature of the history under consideration is as responsible for this as any other single factor.

Eventually, the impression is created of notes for good scenes full of pungent observations and sharp asides, but without fully developed drama or emotion, leaving a sketchy, wispy feeling when all is said and done.

Abetted by the piercing images of lenser Christopher Doyle, the picture has a vivid, nightmarish quality that's more inviting than repellent. But the filmmaker mutes the impact by repeatedly cutting away to other settings, as if he lacked confidence in the power of the moment.

A soundtrack in search of a movie, Empire Records is one teen-music effort that never finds a groove.

What really makes The Truth About Cats & Dogs special in places however, is Garofalo's dry, self-effacing wit and Thurman's ditzy, old-style Hollywood glamour.

On its own terms, the plotting of "Devil" is absorbing, and the pieces actually fit together pretty decently. On the other hand, when scenes directly call to mind similar ones in "Chinatown," this effort's stepchild relationship to the classic is forcibly demonstrated.

The thriller telegraphs most of its suspense payoffs, and the audience is almost always ahead of the game. What's most disappointing is that the characters begin as well-etched individuals, but are gradually turned into mere plot functions.

[An] earnest, often moving but not totally successful film.

Milos Forman's meticulously produced Valmont is an extremely well-acted period piece that suffers from stately pacing and lack of dramatic high points.

Francis Ford Coppola's take on the Dracula legend is a bloody visual feast. Both the most extravagant screen telling of the oft-filmed story and the one most faithful to its literary source, this rendition sets grand romantic goals for itself that aren't fulfilled emotionally, and it is gory without being at all scary.

This decorous look at the great man's five years as ambassador to France in the period leading up to the French Revolution touches upon much significant history, incident and emotion but, ironically, lacks the intrigue and drama of great fiction.

Rumble Fish is another Francis Coppola picture that's overwrought and overthought with camera and characters that never quite come together in anything beyond consistently interesting.

Poetic Justice is a hermetic inner-city love story elevated by resonant social commentary.

Witness is at times a gentle, affecting story of star-crossed lovers limited within the fascinating Amish community. Too often, however, this fragile romance is crushed by a thoroughly absurd shoot-em-up, like ketchup poured over a delicate Pennsylvania Dutch dinner.

Quite simply, It Takes Two is just too cute for words.

Sophie's Choice is a handsome, doggedly faithful and astoundingly tedious adaptation of William Styron's best-seller.

Director Curtis Hanson makes a commendable effort with a rather obvious story about three teenage boys who head for a wild weekend in Tijuana, hoping to trade hard cash for manly experience.

Francis Coppola has made a well acted and crafted but highly conventional film out of S.E. Hinton's popular youth novel, The Outsiders.

When the underdog always wins he's not much of an underdog anymore, and the narrative cartwheels Sylvester Stallone has turned over the years to put Rocky in that position have peeled away the novelty.

Unswervingly sincere and dramatic without surprise or revelation, screenwriter Joe Eszterhas' longtime pet project may be personal, but it offers little to audiences that hasn't been served up in quantity in the past.

Children should love the film and adults will be dismayed by the light brushstrokes with which Paul Reubens (one of three credited screenwriters, but star-billed under his stage name, Pee-wee Herman) suggests touches of Buster Keaton and Eddie Cantor.

The expensive new version of Flash Gordon is a lot more gaudy, and just as dumb, as the original series starring Buster Crabbe. Sam J. Jones in the title role has even less thespic range than Crabbe, but the badness of his performance is part of the fun of the film. Jones, a former Playgirl nude centerfold whose only previous film role was the husband of Bo Derek in 10, lumbers vacantly through the part of Flash Gordon with the naivete, fearlessness, and dopey line readings familiar from the 1930s serials. Film benefits greatly from the adroit performance of Max von Sydow as Emperor Ming.

Territory is typical small town Steven Spielberg; this time set in a coastal community in Oregon. Story is told from the kids' point-of-view and takes a rather long time to be set in motion.

A fitting final installment in Terry Gilliam's trilogy begun with Time Bandits and continued with Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen shares many of those films strengths and weaknesses, but doesn't possess the visionary qualities of the latter.

Result is far more accessible than Jia's previous two pictures, with moments of genuine emotion by the real-life interviewees.

This vapid street-dance soap opera boasts the series' flashiest moves and klutziest script yet, like a brilliant acrobat with a speech impediment; it's also one of the few 3D releases since "Avatar" to make compelling use of the format.