You know, I don't remember the fart and pee jokes in The Wizard of Oz or the old Disney classics or the Muppet movies. Crotch-biting, of course, comes from a long tradition. Hmm.

A bit like staring at a beauty queen's phonily tight smile for ninety minutes.

Josh Gilbert's smoothly produced documentary a/k/a Tommy Chong should leave even Nancy Reagan aghast at the unfair trials of comedian Tommy Chong.

Cipriano and...Cuesta (L.I.E.) show realism, tender regard, and the benefit of the doubt for their young characters, but little of the same to their childish parents.

A nutty, fictional ode-elegy to a show that's still going strong, A Prairie Home Companion offers a unique hybrid of a folksy American showman and an improvisatory impresario.

a fresh bid for indie-thriller cred....[but] watching Gamazon and Dela Llana charge through their limitations is a bit like watching a sprinter run in clogs.

Even if Cars isn't the studio's champion outing, Pixar continues to run on all cylinders.

If you've never seen The Omen, the technically well-made remake is an effective chiller a cut above today's standard, but if you have, there's no reason to watch this rote replay.

[An] inspirational tale, which values team spirit even as it celebrates the will of two talented individuals.

At least one draft short of brilliance....[but] more palatable than the typical romantic comedy, thanks in large part to Vaughn's engaging duets with the ensemble.

Definitely propaganda on an issue that remains divisive....[but] Even if Gore is wrong, and I'm not saying he is, his proposed solutions are common-sensibly sound.

The 'free spirited innocent' archetype doesn't convincingly share residence with this numbly sexual Lolita.

[Not] very amusing--its stabs at humor are low-key to a fault, and too sporadic--but it is mostly truthful about yuppie love, and that's something.

Cave uses the taming of Australia as the backdrop for a nasty, dirty western about the implications of violence.

Amateur Hour-and-a-Half....It isn't fit for human consumption.

Fatally short on laughs. The jokes are mostly bad vaudeville, as when Piven asks, "How much for 50 Cent? Okay, how about 17 Cent?"

The voice work and animation are both a cut above the average, and the film's energy is brisk.

There's camp, and there's just plain lousy writing.

Musical...handsome...poignantly nostalgic...The Lost City is a lot of things, but what it's not is incisive.

Obvious...All [but soccer fanatics] can pass on Goal! The Dream Begins and make plans now to avoid its two upcoming sequels.

On more than one occasion...a girl scrapes her fingernails across a wood floor as an invisible poltergeist attacks her. The wood floor may not be a chalkboard, but it's close enough.

Why does the new Lindsay Lohan picture have such a poo fixation?....Could it be that director Donald Petrie is Freudian slipping on his s**tty material?

Zwigoff too often picks up his putty knife when he should be running with scissors...doesn't quite add up to the sum of its parts, but some of the parts are pretty amusing all the same.

Jimmy Buffet may be known for his Hawaiian shirts, but there's something undeniably plaid about Hoot.

A thrill ride, and a gripping one: plausibility-straining, predictable at times, but pulse-pounding all the same.

Detailed and graced with irreverent humor and fine performances, Mehta's film deals powerful blows to economic injustice and misogyny.

Dramatically jerry-rigged in every possible way.

Too lazy to perfect its own routine...[but] a surprisingly appealing vacation, from sense to sensibility.

Color me surprised when Barry Sonnenfeld's family comedy turned out to be a palatable picture that doesn't rob Robin Williams of his dignity as a comic actor.

A unique film about a unique event...but what will we think of United 93 in five years or, for that matter, fifty?

The actors play it with poker-faces, but the further we go into the noir territory of hard-boiled, fast-paced dialogue and dames wrapped in crimson and black, the more ticklish Brick gets.

Not everything works in this semi-audacious challenge to the American Dream, but Weitz consistently and amusingly hits the broad side of the barn.

Strictly boilerplate...fail[s] to pursue any interesting avenues, using the cardboard characters as mere shooting-range targets.

I just don't see much entertainment value--or, certainly, a shelf life--in a contrived string of mildly amusing parodies of bad movies. Here today, yawn tomorrow.

Rigged for your pleasure...everything is played up for schmaltz value or dopey laughs.

Skews just enough toward Death and the Maiden and away from Saw III.

Since Lu depicts the punishing, unforgiving determination on both sides of the conflict, the film is not entirely pitiless for the pathetic criminal class.

Offers nothing in the way of balancing the protest viewpoint...[but] still usefully revisits--during our current unpopular war--the internal conflict of America during the Vietnam War.

More clever than insightful, [but] Harron makes the most of that humorously earnest style ripped from the pin-up pages.

Gives the characters relatable failings and the story some ironic bite...[but] lacks the depth of empathy Holofcener showed in Lovely and Amazing.

The dance remains the same...Take the Lead has exactly two things going for it (each worth one star): the always entertaining Antonio Banderas and a lot of ballroom dancing.

It's heartening to be able to report that ATL is as much like Diner as it is like Boys in the Hood....Robinson may overdose on style, but he also respects the homegrown origins of this ATLanta-bred tale.

The seams show...a somewhat grudging social obligation for audiences over the age of ten to tow their younger charges.

Gets by because it knows it's dorky. It's happily dorky. It's proudly dorky.

A scathing satire....If there's a lesson, it's that spinning your fellow Americans is the real national pastime--the greater problem is when you spin yourself.

Just because American films frequently exploit repressed memories as a plot device in nasty genre pictures doesn't make the genteel Don't Tell a sophisticated or particularly insightful film.

A divided domestic electorate will take [it] either as a kick-***, future-punk primal scream of political frustration or as an irresponsible, literally and figuratively incendiary attack on our...approval-deficient leaders.