The movie, as its title suggests, means to be one of those Tarantino-esque in-your-face jobs, amusing on the audacity of its outrageousness. Here's how "outrageous" it is: Zzzzzz-zzzz.

In Upside Down, writer-director Juan Solanas takes the gimmick about as far as it can go, rendering the metaphor of longing and separation in effective, and richly visual, terms. If anything, however, he goes too far.

A sequel every bit as clumsy, ham-handed, outlandish and laughable as the original was sleek, tough and efficient.

This Hollywood Pictures production (basically, a Walt Disney adult venture) culls every Capitol-corruption cliche in the book for the dullest 90 minutes Murphy has ever appeared in.

The main reason to see Step Up 3D is for the high-energy dancing and innovative camerawork, and on those points it delivers.

Alien Nation wants to be "In the Heat of the Night" as science fiction, but it's neither morally instructive nor prophetic. It proves a lumbering marriage of action and sci-fi that alienates both audiences. It's too dull for one and too dumb for the other.

Haphazardly conceived, phlegmatically paced, lazily filmed and punctuated with gratuitous moments of sexual and scatological slapstick.

A masterpiece of mediocrity,

Despite its mixture of macabre slapstick and broadly stroked caricatures, the film has sleepy-time rhythms; it's easily the pokiest farce I've ever seen.

Friday the Thirteenth meets Saturday Night Fever. Good and promising actors -- people who deserve a better film the next time -- are too numerous to name. [16 Aug 1980, p.D2]

Flower can’t quite nail the necessary tone, aiming for dark, but missing the comedy.

First-time director Trish Sie, a music-video veteran, is more interested in spectacle than character, as she demonstrates even when nobody’s dancing.

It's hard to believe the creative mind that gave us "Almost Famous," "Jerry Maguire," "Say Anything" and "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" looked up with satisfaction after typing 117 pages of this.

You'd never know it from the innocuous-looking trailers, but Home Fries is really "When Dorian Met Sally" meets "Psycho."

Never gels into the smart, tightly orchestrated cat-and-mouse game that it promises to be.

Overblown and idiotic, this new "erotic thriller" is neither erotic nor thrilling; it's long, boring and self-indulgent.

Though Philip Haas's digitally shot film has the firsthand immediacy of such nonfictional docs as "Iraq in Fragments" and "Gunner Palace," its dramatic template feels disappointingly secondhand.

McCarthy is not (yet) a celebrated director, but The Prodigy may change that. As with his under-seen debut film “The Pact,” his greatest asset here is his patience, followed by his evocative use of light, shadow and negative space. He’s a filmmaker who recognizes that the buildup is more fun than the payoff, and he manages to generate suspense with seemingly little happening on the screen.

The Legend of Billie Jean is trashily manipulative and utterly preposterous, so much so that, until the end (when it begins to sour on you), it's a thoroughly enjoyable hoot. Add a splendid cast and good air conditioning, and it's a perfectly mindless way to spend a muggy summer evening.

The humor, which made the first movie appealing to more than just TV kids, is far less adroit.

With strong performances, plenty of chemistry between the leads and pithy dialogue, the movie is fun until things get serious — which is to say, until things get unbelievable.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies delivers what its title promises: a little romance and some undead villains, plus a bit of comedy. But this overly busy riff on Austen’s winning formula doesn’t justify all the tinkering.

Surrogates takes an interesting idea -- the triumph of technological convenience over grimy, workaday life -- and buries it under clumsy exposition, unconvincing action sequences and a by-the-numbers conspiracy plot.

You want to know if The Running Man is a good-time macho show, right? Stay at home and watch professional wrestling. Or Miami Vice (same director -- Paul Michael Glaser). Sure there's blood spattering and bullets riddling and Big Boys Banging Biceps. But through the dry-ice haze, Running Man is surprisingly boring.

The result has a cobbled-together feeling. The Force is not strong with this one.

The Rhythm Section was directed by Reed Morano, who did a nice job with the first few episodes of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” but who seems a bit self-indulgent here.

The movie's message is murky and out of whack. Seidelman's style of comedy trashes everyone. The movie's jokes, which cover everything from dead rodents to geriatric incontinence, are cartoony and sour and misanthropic. And the flukiest thing is that they're misogynic too. It's hard to imagine that a man could have been as ruthlessly coldblooded as Seidelman has been about Ruth's unattractiveness. The network of women workers that Ruth establishes to help her nail her husband runs on pettiness and rancor -- it's a coalition of resentment. In "She-Devil," Seidelman divides the world of women between the envied and the envious. She has a message for the Ruths of the world, and it's not a pretty one. She tells them that the best they can hope for is payback.

No one will ever credit Snatched with discovering new comic territory. But it earns its share of laughs by covering some well-trod ground.