Coming nine years after the original, this supernatural horror sequel is a competently made but uninspired effort. Gore fans should dig it.

Sniper is an expertly directed, yet ultimately unsatisfying psychological thriller. Luis Llosa’s first-rate action direction is undermined by underdeveloped characters and pedestrian dialogue.

A complex look at an illicit affair that ends in disaster for everyone in its vicinity, "Damage" is a cold, brittle film about raging, traumatic emotions. Unjustly famous before its release for its hardly extraordinary erotic content, this veddy British-feeling drama from vet French director Louis Malle proves both compelling and borderline risible, wrenching and yet emotionally pinched, and reps a solid entry for serious art house audiences worldwide.

A courtroom drama built around the charge that Madonna's body is a deadly weapon with which she 'fornicated' a man to death, this showcase for the singer-thesp as femme fatale is more silly than erotic.

An offbeat, darkly hilarious portrait.

It doesn’t help that character personalities generally aren’t distinct enough to keep track of who’s who throughout the story, leaving the audience to empathize only generally.

Action hero Jean-Claude Van Damme takes a career step backward in Nowhere to Run, a relentlessly corny and shamelessly derivative vehicle.

Lorenzo's Oil is as grueling a medical case study as any audience would ever want to sit through. A true-life story brought to the screen intelligently and with passionate motivation by George Miller, pic details in a very precise way how a couple raced time to save the life of their young son after he contracted a rare, always fatal disease.

This grimly ambitious biopic goes no deeper than that, offering hardly a trace of psychology, motivation or inner life.

Throw together The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Rio Bravo, bring in the Ice crew, inject a noxious dose of racial hatred and stir in some sharp action direction and you've got Trespass.

Only a filmmaker with Barry Levinson's clout would have been so indulged to create such a sprawling, seemingly unsupervised mess as Toys, a painful exercise that makes Hudson Hawk look like a modest throwaway.

Expert story construction and compelling thesping and direction make all the narrative elements pay off as if calculated by a precision instrument in which all the parts are working perfectly.

This adaptation of Charles Dickens' Christmas classic is not as enchanting or amusing as the previous entries in the Muppet series. But nothing can really diminish the late Jim Henson's irresistibly appealing characters.

Uneven but occasionally quite funny political satire.

An astonishingly good and daring film that richly develops several intertwined thematic lines, The Crying Game takes giant risks that are stunningly rewarded.

No wonder this Lawrence Kasdan script has been on the shelf for more than a decade: In the custody of director Mick Jackson, it proves a jumbled mess, with a few enjoyable moments but little continuity or flow.

Floridly beautiful, shamelessly derivative and infused with an irreverent, sophisticated comic flair thanks to Robin Williams' vocal calisthenics, Aladdin probably won't equal its beastly predecessor but should still enjoy a magic carpet ride through the holiday season.

Abel Ferrara's uncompromising Bad Lieutenant is a harrowing journey observing a corrupt NY cop sink into the depths, with an extraordinary and uninhibited performance by Harvey Keitel in the title role.

The studio has simply re-made the first movie, only with bigger pratfalls.

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.

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.

Inspired by the 1959 hit song, Dale Launer’s Love Potion No. 9 is a light-hearted one-joke romantic comedy that tries too hard to be cute. Glib humor and emphasis on “feel good” values aim squarely at the dating crowd and twentysomething couples. But lack of real wit and comic vitality, absence of star names and sluggish pace make pic less appealing than it might have been.

A reasonably saucy action tale.

Jennifer Eight is an unusually intelligent and unexploitative late-season thriller, which probably won't help its chances at the box office. Involving without being exciting, pic is notable for avoiding most of the standard suspense film contrivances, as well as for Conrad Hall's utterly smashing cinematography. Interesting cast and sober approach will mean more to critics and sophisticated viewers than to general audiences, resulting in OK results during brief release window before Christmas heavy hitters put this out to video pasture, where it might fare better.

The Lover, a sophisticated adaptation of Marguerite Duras’ bestselling memoir about her love affair as a 15-year-old with a rich, older Chinese man, lacks the distinctive voice and ambiance of the book, but the abundant sex – soft-core and tasteful – and the splendid sets make up for the film’s banal style.

Lively performances, pungent New York City atmosphere and an abundance of dramatic incident keep this story of an irrepressible lowlife hustler ripping along.

More care in scripting and fewer cheap yocks could have resulted in a viable new paranoid horror myth well-timed to America’s ongoing crisis in health care.

Candyman is an upper-register horror item that delivers the requisite shocks and gore but doesn't cheat or cop out.