I haven't seen the original, but I can vouch for the clumsiness of the new version. As usual, though, Queen Latifah is an indomitable, if sometimes undirectable, comic force.

A little humanity can go a long way to make up for a movie's shortcomings, and there's more than a little in Ladder 49, a surprisingly stirring celebration of heroic firefighters.

The story leaves you snoozing with the fishes.

Huckabees is godawful, a mirthless, bilious bore in which the vividly focused fury of "Three Kings" has become free-floating anger at the follies of human existence.

Makes an eloquent case for John Kerry's courage, both during and immediately after his service in Vietnam.

It's not a great film, but there's something to be said for a cool-button treatment of a hot-button issue.

It's "The Sixth Sense" as nonsense, "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" without the sunshine. Or the mind.

A convincing, entertaining portrait of the revolutionist as a young man.

A sports movie with a quick wit, uncommon grace and a romantic soul.

The best way to see Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow -- if you see it at all -- is as an interesting experiment that failed.

Mr. Sayle's portrait is painfully unfunny, and the movie as a whole is a plodding polemic.

Reconstruction means to be confusing, and is. It also means to intrigue us, and does.

Built on such a goofy premise that your average soap-opera scriptwriter would laugh it out of a story meeting.

Despite the curry flavoring Ms. Nair has seen fit to add, this is a Vanity Fair without spice.

An excruciatingly embarrassing display of ego and ineptitude.

Rich in motion -- the very clothes of the characters seem under a choreographer's direction -- as well as imagery.

Unspeakably ghastly sequel to the merely ghastly original.

Directed by E. Elias Merhige, the film is never less than entertaining, but Sir Ben's portrayal of a sympathetic psychopath gives it a special zing.

Well, incredibly stupid is certainly what is delivered to audiences.

Earnest but deeply flawed.

As in most movies of this sort from "Rebel Without a Cause" to "West Side Story" to last year's "Thirteen," adults are marginalized, clueless or absent. I'm with them.

Set ablaze by a startling performance by Laura Dern, it's a stark, often disturbing look at the ramifications of betrayal.

As reassuring and soothing as a nursery story.

Hugely entertaining thriller.

"Working Girl," is also heard in Little Black Book; it serves only to remind audiences of that far more winning story of triumph in the office. But there are many reminders of what a tiresome effort this is.

At times somber, and now and then dangerously close to self-important, Code 46 is nonetheless a smart, mature film that examines who and what we can be to each other, in a world full of invention and change.

Open Water, which was made for $130,000 -- and seemingly without special-effects assistance -- proves you don't have to have a big budget to have an audience on the edge of its seat.

Shrewdly reconceived, powerfully acted and hugely entertaining.

It's bad enough to make parable a four-letter word.

Mr. Luchini gives one of the best performances of the year, in one of the best movies of the year.

Mr. Braff's idea of self-discovery is my idea of narcissism.

It's too much for a feature film, and too little, but it certainly isn't dull.

Supremacy certainly works on its own terms, but those terms are limiting. It's an entertainment machine about a killing machine.

Qualifies as top-grade catnip for connoisseurs of trashy camp.

Impressive for Patrick Tatopoulos's production design but depressive for the juiceless story.

A remarkable -- and harrowing -- debut feature that makes you think there's hope after all for the future of independent films.

One of those rare and complex dramas that you can enter, not simply watch.

The sweet spirit that made last year's "Elf" such a success has curdled considerably.

Every sport, and every sports film, must have its superman. The role is filled here by Laird Hamilton, who, we are told -- and, more astonishingly, shown -- took "the single most significant ride in surfing history." Seeing is believing.

Bleak, remarkably turgid, tediously violent, devoid of drama, deprived of magic, stripped of romance and, except for one of the oddest boy-meets-girl scenes in movie history, a befuddled and befuddling excuse for entertainment.

A limited movie that can't animate its subject amid all the tricks and glitz. De-Lovely is devoid of life.

It's "My Dinner With Andre" for the relationship generation.

The Clearing has been directed by a successful producer. In this case it's Pieter Jan Brugge, who brings seriousness and intelligence to his newly chosen craft, but little verve.

A lot of talent to lavish on a single movie, but the result is uncommonly smart for the genre, and not just smart but tremendously enjoyable.

A lovely surprise. Ripe with feeling and lush with physical beauty, it's a love story that swings confidently between age and youth, and, like the young Tiger Woods of old, avoids every trap along the way.

At its best, Fahrenheit 9/11 is an impressionist burlesque of contemporary American politics that culminates in a somber lament for lives lost in Iraq. But the good stuff -- and there's some extremely good stuff -- keeps getting tainted by Mr. Moore's poison-camera penchant for drawing dark inferences from dubious evidence.

The Terminal is a terminally fraudulent and all-but-interminable comedy.

Though there's less to the film than seduces the eye, the allure of those surfaces can be hypnotic.

Its terrific cast kept making me laugh out loud.

A tatty but good-natured time-passer.

A pitiful shambles of a remake, The Stepford Wives might have qualified as a rethinking of the 1975 original if there were any trace of coherent thought in the finished product.

More than a deadpan comedy about oddball losers. This dork has his day, and this story has its touching subtext -- growing pains relieved by unlikely hope.

The right word for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is wondersful -- as in full of wonders, great and small.

Please see this movie, and take any kids old enough to read subtitles. It's one of a kind.

It's a powerful polemic in its own right, despite some maddeningly glib generalizations, a documentary that functions as a 2½-hour provocation in the ongoing debate about corporate conduct and governance.

Seldom has grandeur struggled so mightily, and fruitlessly, with rampant goofiness.

It's a great accomplishment and, at a time when satire is in short supply, a terrific surprise.

Ms. Hudson makes the most of her role, even though that's not saying so very much -- the writing is terribly thin -- while John Corbett gives an unaccountably clumsy performance as a romantic pastor. Joan Cusack gets the funniest lines as Helen's sister, a model of boring mommyhood, but she also stops the movie dead in its tracks every time she plays a scene.

Mr. Samuell's stylistic revelries are meant as comments on the conventions and excesses of movie romance, but his approach is glib and self-congratulatory. No feelings dwell beneath the layers upon layers of faux-naïve artifice. I dare you to sit through this movie and not wish you were somewhere else.

News management is the main issue. Control Room shows how coverage is tailored to fit the audience, both by al-Jazeera and its Western counterparts.

There's an old-Hollywood feel to the movie's solid showmanship and unabashed sophistication. These days it's feature-length 'toons, sporting the newest-fangled technology, that take kids and adults alike back to the movies' good old days.

In Troy, and in overreaching, underachieving productions like it, digital imagery is fast becoming both a Trojan horse and Achilles' heel.

Although mood often substitutes for momentum in Ms. Kalem's film, both of her stars give affecting performances, and there's growth on both sides of the unlikely romance.

Once in a great while a film seems right in every detail. Andre Techine's Strayed ("Les Egares") is such a film.

One of the many stylistic distinctions of this outwardly modest production is the complex voice that the filmmaker has found for his young hero.

Nothing's alive in this trash-heap travesty of warm-weather entertainment, despite the frenetic pace.

This shabby enterprise gets so many things so wrong that it freezes your face into a cringe.

A high school comedy that is sharply observed and often terrifically funny, yet oddly misconceived.

Before and after plot mechanics, a drama of family tension and warmth.

Isn't the best romantic comedy one might wish for, but it's more than good enough.

The movie's leisurely, elegant setup makes its action payoff seem, by contrast, particularly mechanical, cynical and grotesque.

Deeply affecting.

Here's an entertainment to warm the heart of anyone who grew up (or failed to) on the formative joys of action movies.

Punishes the audience with a flat starring performance; Mr. Jane finds few sparks of life in a hero who wasn't all that lively to begin with.

Suffers from a lifelessness that seems built into the terse, slightly detached style of the director, David Mackenzie, who also did the adaptation.

A misshapen semi-spectacle that seems to be simulating an epic, and getting away with it only occasionally.

The fascination here is not so much the surface drama, though that is suspenseful and sometimes shocking, but Michele's inability to grasp the nature and extent of the evil that surrounds him.

A perfect fit in the category of instant classic, and, not incidentally, fits the profile of super-profitability. Bursting the bonds of its genre, Hellboy fills the screen with gorgeous imagery, vertiginous action and a surprising depth of feeling.

Any shortfalls in Home on the Range a conventional but perfectly pleasant entertainment, have more to do with the ABC's of storytelling than with the D's of animation.

The movie itself is neither a catastrophe nor major.

This beautiful -- and beautifully controlled -- film is also an object lesson in how to hypnotize an audience.

The nadir of the movie -- or cheesy zenith -- is Ollie's sodden soliloquy, delivered in the presence of his baby, in which he laments the loss of her mother and his wife. All that's missing are the strains of Ravel's "Pavane For a Dead Princess."

In fairness, the movie is good for more than a few laughs, but little substance lurks beneath the antic poses and frantic shenanigans in this remake of the classic 1955 English comedy.

A symphony for tin ears, a sniggering assessment of human nature delivered with the faux-lofty tone of a Lexus commercial.

One of those rare collaborations that artists dream of, and that film lovers crave.

Given the white-on-white color scheme, I didn't expect so many shades of feeling.

Secret Window has an ending that lets one of our most reliably interesting actors pull out all the stops. But getting there from a good beginning followed by a slow, repetitive middle is a test of resourcefulness for him and a test of patience for us.

Feelings play second fiddle to stylized attitudes in Spartan, and fancy style can't conceal the film's clumsiness.

Full of life -- which is a very good thing to say about a story that turns on death -- wonderfully odd, and a gallery of perfect performances.

What's wrong with this picture? Nothing, as long as you don't expect more than a tossed-off goof.

This movie needs a star performance at its center, and the director, Joe Johnston, doesn't seem to know it. His closeups dote on Mr. Mortensen's striking face, and on the actor's interesting inwardness, but he doesn't ask for, or find, the sort of zest that could turn laconic into romantic.

Entertaining and improbably endearing.

The crucial evidence has to do with rigor mortis. The movie's a stiff too.

What I do know is that I was gripped for a while by the strength of Mr. Gibson's filmmaking, only to be repelled and eventually excluded by his literalist insistence on excruciation. There is watching in horror, and there is watching in horror.

Some comedies make you laugh out loud. This one makes you smile inwardly, but often.

A shopworn studio contraption, slapped together from second-hand parts.

No one comes out of Mooseport unscathed -- not Rip Torn, as the president's campaign manager, not Christine Baranski as his avaricious ex-wife. It's a democracy of mediocrity, or worse.

Adam Sandler's 50 First Dates isn't just slovenly and smarmy but creepy.