Life at least deserves a nod for supplying the mostly dramatic actress with her first starring comedic role.

Failed feminist statement or not, Coyote Ugly is a likable, if confused film.

The action is constant, often pointless, definitely gratuitous, and breathlessly fun.

It's impossible to shake the feeling that these are merely actors -- albeit good ones.

Ambrose owns this crawlspace between being fierce and being fragile. But she can't escape the fact that her role is underwritten; the script suffers from an excess of subtlety.

The film is by no means a disaster. Possession is prettily performed, prettily put-together. Yet, for a story set so firmly in the center of a fire, LaBute and his players have suited themselves in some mighty flame-retardant threads.

What it needs is a little more dirtying down. What it needs, in short, is less New York, and more Alabama.

The exceedingly silly Super Troopers is an earnest, mostly funny spoof.

That's the ultimate cheat in this pleasant, but trifling affair: Allen has cheated himself out of an actress (Leoni) that could have been Diane Keaton's heir.

Fact is, good looks will go a long way in masking mediocrity, and Hollywood Homicide capitalizes on that fact doubly so: Co-writer/director Ron Shelton’s latest boasts two pretty faces, and all across the country, mothers and daughters sigh alike.

Feels like a Fincher film: It possesses the same smarts, the same visual panache, the same violence. But not the same heart.

It’s just too much drama for one modest film to service adequately. In an effort to cram it all in, scenes abruptly jump from one to the next with nary a smooth transition in sight, relationships evolve far too quickly, and certain subplots drop out of the mix only to resurface, jarringly, much later.

Scooby's just so dang cute, what's the point in grousing?

Phillips and co-writer Scot Armstrong waste too much time on a silly love-interest subplot for Wilson; that time is much better served by the frat-boy idiocies, like Frank beer-bonging himself into streaking.

Overall, Just Married doesn't really take -- it has a shelf life about as short as the disastrous honeymoon -- but in the moment, it's cute, if corny. It'll do.

It's kinda funny and pretty cute. Sometimes that's all it takes.

Big, dumb, and fun.

If you shy away from that sick feeling in the pit of the stomach that comes when watching good people make bad decisions, then best to steer clear of Manito, a low-budget indie that reaches near-Greek proportions of tragedy brought on by lousy decision-making.

Has a heart bursting with good intentions, something that goes a long way in dimming from memory its inherent routineness.

Silly, predictable, and, dare I say it, oddly endearing, Hackers is the first film I've seen in a long while that annoyed me so much I actually enjoyed it.

Ultimately Hedges’ film, like the turkey, comes out underdone.

Until Hollywood stops being a boys club, and America graduates beyond short pants and its embarrassingly pubescent attitudes toward sex, I suppose one can only hope that all male adolescent fantasies will play as goofily sweet as this one.

It goes down easy, with likable performances and a laudable emphasis on love and compassion.

A certain inevitability hangs over The Mother – as if any of this could end well – but if Kureishi's framework is perhaps predictable, his knotty, complex characters are not.

Two hours pass painlessly enough, thanks to the affability of its trio of leads, Hathaway, Andrews, and Elizondo.

The elements are all here for something spectacular – and in brilliant bursts, Jeunet really gets it – but in the end, all that potential is sunk by a terminally confused tone and milquetoast pairing of lovers. Pity that.

The movie can be funny in fits, but too often the scripters go for the obvious and uninspired.

Uneven, ineffective mash-up of sex comedy and artillery-heavy action.