Gene Seymour

Goes into a tailspin after its impressive setup. Its dramatic tactics become so tangled and diffuse that, by the end, you get the feeling that everything gets tied up too hastily.

There's something plodding and uncomfortably strident about Little Animals that keeps the audience from sharing, much less understanding, Bobby's enchantment.

Sophisticated romantic comedy for people who think "Corky Romano" is trenchant political satire.

The hard-sell comic delivery one expects from contemporary date movies is pleasantly tempered here.

Snarkiness and sentiment are in constant battle for supremacy throughout Run, Fat Boy, Run with no chance of a comfortable draw.

Kattan and Ferrell do their best to fill out the shallow Butabis.

After a while, the only way for a reasonably intelligent person to get through The Country Bears is to ponder how a whole segment of pop-music history has been allowed to get wet, fuzzy and sticky.

Lays thick, goopy layers of uplift on what should be lighter on the heart and stomach.

Succeeds best when it intensifies its focus on the work and life of its main subject, seen in interviews, home movies and in a climactic performance with Bono and the Edge on "Tower of Song."

A dismal pastiche of threadbare plot devices and not-so-comic interludes.

It's no use expecting Return to Never Land to match, much less exceed, Disney's 1953 version of "Peter Pan," which by itself isn't quite in the uppermost tier of the studio's full-length cartoons.

For all its familiar conventions and hoary improbabilities, Double Jeopardy is a relatively efficient model of its kind.

They (Brooks and Douglas) are so out of sync with each other that they seem to be looking for different movies to take their acts, though neither makes you want to see those hypothetical films. Not even as an option to this one.

A spicy little pastry with just the right proportions of flakiness and gooeyness.

If I were 6, I could enjoy Rebound without thinking about all the better movies made from its concept.

Drains the original story of its satire and juices up its shtick, schmaltz and special effects.

His constant chatter may grate, but Noya does the wide-eyed wonderment thing very well.

As a full-service holiday movie, The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause gets you into the mood to shop early and often by making the North Pole look like a shopping mall with a never-ending school pageant.

The droll cast--especially Ferrer, who's exquisite as a tough-talking dunce--deserved something more fully realized than this.

Even the movie finds itself asking when it'll end. Not soon enough.

Those 24-and-unders who are looking for their own "Caddyshack" to adopt as a generational signpost may have to keep looking.

An unintentional parody of every teen movie made in the last five years. Which can be the only rational explanation for making such a mess all over the screen.

Despite the occasional topical reference to President Bush and Sen. Clinton, this movie is, like, so eight years ago, it isn't funny.

So why does Eight Legged Freaks make one laugh out loud even though there is nothing revolutionary about its approach to the giant bug genre? -- the movie is so unapologetic in its crassness that it disarms even the fussiest connoisseur of throwaway disaster flicks.

You might start to seriously wonder if there's a way to get this woman to run for office here in America.

A coy, frantic attempt at screwball comedy, lightly seasoned and more than a little gummy.

As long as you keep thinking of "Babe," you can't help thinking that there's no excuse for movies like Good Boy! to merely push the usual buttons, deploy the usual poop jokes and carry out the usual sight gags.

A hostage drama, cliches intact, is what we get.