A Time to Kill seems to argue that America's racial problems aren't so bad because, even in the heart of bigoted Mississippi, a black man can get away with murder.

If the characters were more interesting, the long, long buildup to their night of ghostly reckoning might be suspenseful rather than tedious.

Like Doom itself, the movie is rich in backstory, but sparse in actual story.

The willowy Danes' rich, melancholy characterization is sown in a barren field of snippy attitude and too-cool posturing, and the film's disingenuous air of bittersweet chic becomes deeply tiresome long before it's over.

The cast is eclectic and talented, but their roles are two-dimensional and the is-it-or-isn't-it-satirical? tone ensures that their performances never seem properly pitched.

Derivative and utterly implausible, ERASER is big-budget action filmmaking at its dullest.

Watts is good -- occasionally very good -- and her willingness to be filmed at unflattering angles, in pore-wallowing or with bright blue ice cream smeared on her face is admirable.

Black comedy requires perfect pitch: Pedro Almodovar has it and cowriters/directors Michalis Reppas and Thanasis Papathanasiou don't, at least by the evidence of this film.

That the 27-year-old Usher isn't much of an actor is no surprise, but he's strikingly uncharismatic for someone who's been in the spotlight since he was six.

Ironically, Faris' Samantha is the most convincing personality in the mix: She's a grotesque caricature of Courtney Love by way of Nancy Spungen, a vulgar, selfish monster of unbridled id, but you always know where she's coming from.

Rip Torn, Linda Hunt and Jerry O'Connell mark time in minor supporting roles.

This live-action cartoon tries to walk the line between pleasing the faithful and appealing to a broad-based action audience. It fails on both fronts: It's too lifeless and watered-down to stand on its own high heels, but commits the cardinal sin of messing with the original.

Ironically, one of the film's best-developed characters is a mouse: The four-legged "Chizzler" actually has a legitimate story arc with a genuine payoff.

However deep the divide currently separating the Middle East from the West appears to be, there's at least one thing we can all agree on: Albert Brooks isn't all that funny anymore.

This ersatz jungle adventure is really a thinly disguised Sunday School lesson in faith, charity and the savagery of life without Christ.

Lawrence is a comedian with talent who rarely uses it for anything worthwhile, and here he makes a halfhearted, paycheck-collecting effort that's actually in perfect keeping with the rest of the movie's tired, recycled tone.

Rather than remake the entire original movie, Simon West and screenwriter Jake Wade Wall have taken only that now-classic first act and padded it out into a dull, filler-filled feature that's remarkably void of any new ideas.

The downtime between deaths has never been duller, and the Rube Goldberg-type death scenes are so poorly staged that it's difficult to figure out what's about to happen and to whom.

The charismatic Rajskub, who played a prickly computer geek on TV's "24," has nothing to do as Jack's loyal secretary.

Sacre bleu! Bumbling French police inspector Jacques Clouseau is back, and he's never been less funny.

Nielsen's schtick is getting pretty threadbare by now -- his movies used to wring laughs from assaults on his silver-haired dignity, but after years of screen buffoonery, he has no dignity left to assault.

Though Keaton is convincing as a smarmy narcissist who secretly thinks he deserves to fail because writing plays isn't REAL work, he's also thoroughly unlikable -- a problematic trait in a protagonist.

It's by no stretch of the imagination a good film, but it delivers what it promises: naked girls whaling on each other, flesh-ripping zombies and genre stalwart Todd growling and glowering satanically from beneath a mane of dreadlocks - the He-Who-Kills teeth are a nice touch.

Folks watching any movie that opens with a shot of a butt crack (with the possible exception of "Lost in Translation") can't claim they weren't warned.

For all the sex and slicing, the most shocking thing about it is how dreary it is.

This formulaic mess of sports-movie cliches and self-esteem claptrap contains a couple of funny bits, but you have to slog through a lot of done-to-death bodily function jokes to get to them.

It's hard to believe this shoddy, dishonest mess is Clark's sixth feature film, and not the unpromising debut of a rank amateur.

To call the film noisy and brainless isn't even a criticism - it's unadulterated auto-porn, as shallow and shiny as it wants to be.