Ron Stringer

The excellent cast is headed by Gwyneth Paltrow in the mood-shifting title role and Daniel Craig as the helpless, not-so-happily philandering Hughes.

Calculated to titillate middlebrow audiences on both sides of la Manche.

By highlighting the human costs of slavery to everyone BUT the enslaved -- here, relations between African-American domestics and their owners are cordial, even respectful, on both sides -- Maxwell risks being pilloried as an apologist for that institution.

The film should also wow fans of Herbert Wise's "I, Claudius" and Franco Zeffirelli's "Jesus of Nazareth" alike.

The cast's sometimes capable, sometimes gross mugging is overwhelmed by lavish costumes, shiny vintage cars, hordes of meticulously directed extras, and the here-incongruous seriousness with which the French still regard this momentous, if humiliating, chapter of their national history.

Unfortunately, fulfilling an apparent need to assert absolute control over his early successes no matter the cost, the director has gone ahead and loused up his 1979 masterpiece of gothic sci-fi horror.

What Ratner brings to the proceedings is an awareness that what worked for "Silence" -- namely screenwriter Ted Tally, production designer Kristi Zea and, of course, Anthony Hopkins as Lecter -- will work overtime here, to enhance the project at hand and provide a seamless connection back to Jonathan Demme's multiple-Oscar winner.

Of course, this is just another teen movie -- with tons of dick jokes that don't know when to quit, and buckets of realistic-looking "excrement" splattered all over its "juvenile" cast, and even a couple of gags that actually fly.

Provides an unfulfilled promise of pleasure (providing one doesn't cave in to the spectacle of bare-chested Elizabeth Hurley sucking on an ice cube) in this heavy-handed exercise in time-vaulting literary pretension.

Performance after performance -- by Kim Stanley, Marlon Brando, Laurette Taylor . . . Never heard of her? That’s reason enough not to miss this movie.

Occasionally scary, never coherent.

Impressive supporting cast---, in character parts both expanded and invented, enrich the enterprise.

If the trailer for this one left you feeling you'd pretty much got it, plot point by plot point, so really why bother.

Country singer and sometime actor Tim McGraw excels as the bitter, besotted ex-Panther who can't cut his kid enough slack to follow his own game plan.

Overlong, hard look at the perils of tampering with Creation.

An awesome introduction to the sport and the outspoken personalities -- riders, mechanics, engineers, lorry drivers, commentators, fans and girlfriends -- who support it.

The fault lies mostly with the writers, who consistently come up short on wit and imagination enough to finish, let alone flesh out or polish, a joke.

The main inspiration here seems to be David Lynch, though fans of Fred Walton’s 1979 hair-raiser "When a Stranger Calls" may experience a touch of déjà vu as well.

It manages, in the course of a single tersely delineated story, to say more about the dark pathology of American racism than any five character arcs in "Crash." So go, by all means, but be prepared to take a beating.

The “surprise” ending, when it comes, is more of a hoot than a holler.

Game Over provides no answers.

Still and all, the makeup special effects are as over the top as anything in Hooper and L.M. Kit Carson's 1986 Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, and -- for those of us without the sense to steer clear of this sort of thing -- that's saying something.

You may as well watch the movie too, if only so that another of life's astonishing possibilities won't have entirely passed you by.

A stinker.

Allusive as all hell, Tuvalu's slapstick allegory of European socioeconomic upheaval in the 20th century opens with a spoof of "Breaking the Waves" lofty coda, then races through a mise en scène that's equal parts Tarkovsky, Méliès and the Brothers Quay.

A fine specimen of clean-cut Mormon family entertainment, but it may also be a step in the wrong direction for the fledgling production company.

The fun here is not so much in the solid if stolid performances from Bale and co-stars Taye Diggs and Emily Watson (gussied up to resemble the Jefferson Airplane–era Grace Slick) or in Wimmer's overpolished plot devices as it is in the production values.

Yo momma so fat, when she gets in an elevator, it has to go down. Had enough?