To the woman who broke Adrian Lyne’s heart all those years ago: Stop what you’re doing right this minute. Drop everything, pick up the phone and call him. Apologize profusely for cheating on him. Tell him it’s all your fault and you’re a worse person for leaving him. Offer him…

Say this about World Wrestling Federation Entertainment head honcho Vince McMahon: He knows what his fans want. Few movies have ever been as specifically tailored to an existing audience as The Scorpion King, in which McMahon’s prize champion, The Rock, portrays The Rock wearing a loincloth and going by the…

Ben Affleck is Gavin Banek, a slick attorney who can’t seem to get why people hate lawyers (and him) so much, even as he’s persuading a senile philanthropist to sign over power of appointment to his firm. Samuel L. Jackson is Doyle Gipson, an insurance telemarketer who attends Al-Anon meetings…

This film is loosely based, without credit, on H.G. Wells’ short story “The New Accelerator,” in which a scientist figures out a way to slow time down to such an extent that everything else moves in super slo-mo; in essence, he’s moving so fast that to the rest of the…

Looking at the original Blade now, it’s not as impressive as it seemed at the time; its hugely positive reception among the comic-book crowd may have been the result of it simply not sucking. It came out before The Matrix brought Hong Kong-style wires and trenchcoats to the world’s attention,…

In the original Resident Evil video game–named Biohazard in its Japanese incarnation–a brash young American infiltrates a large manor house in the country, only to find it inhabited by terrifying, soulless zombies. But since Gosford Park already came out, the makers of the Resident Evil movie had to go with…

As bounty hunter Buccum, Ice Cube zaps people unnecessarily with tasers, points his gun at a kid, tortures a man using metal screws and engages in ethnic slurs–all in the service of obtaining some diamonds that aren’t rightfully his to begin with. Flawed heroes are one thing, but this is…

Call it the art-house, or thinking person’s, Ocean’s Eleven. If you’re in the mood for an all-star ensemble but prefer conversation and reminiscence over thievery, try Last Orders, a Fred Schepisi film that features the strongest lineup of English talent this side of Robert Altman’s mega-cast in the forthcoming Gosford…

“One man is about to do the unthinkable. No sex. Whatsoever. For…40 Days and 40 Nights.” Um, hello? Is that, like, supposed to be hard? But Matt (Josh Hartnett) isn’t like the rest of us. Beautiful women throw themselves at him daily, and it’s such a problem. Why? Well, he’s…

Barry Skolnick’s remake of 1974’s The Longest Yard never gets as amusing as its opening sequence, a fake sneaker commercial in which soccer thug Vinnie Jones, playing soccer thug Danny “Mean Machine” Meehan, spoofs James Bond. It took three writers to adapt the Burt Reynolds vehicle about an incarcerated football…

Though it consists of all-new footage, Escaflowne is still a 93-minute condensation of a 26-episode TV series, with all the pitfalls of such you’d expect: too many characters, no reason to care about them, forced dramatic beats and excessive exposition. Matters aren’t helped by a flat, generic English dub. The…

It’s hard not to love a movie that posits Britney Spears as a nerd, a high school valedictorian, an aspiring med-school student, an amateur mechanic and the spawn of Dan Aykroyd. When she finally reveals that she’s also a poet, sincerely reading Dido’s lyrics for “I’m Not a Girl, Not…

Every couple of years, it seems, we’re obliged to get at least one documentary that provides the revelation that porn stars just aren’t happy people. So now we know John Holmes was a drug addict and a criminal, Annabel Chong cuts herself and Stacy Valentine will submit to every surgical…

This epic series of 10 hour-long films, each based on one of the Ten Commandments, finishes up with a rare note of whimsy. But first Kieslowski revs up the emotional wringer one last time for episode IX, “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife,” in which a doctor must face…

Though he takes a beating early on, watching his wife and son die in an embassy bombing carried out by Marxist, drug-running Colombian terrorists, it isn’t long before Arnold Schwarzenegger is striding through the jungles of Colombia as if on a Stairmaster, ignoring admonitions that to do so is “frickin’…

Originally made for Polish TV in 1987, and seen only sporadically at special festival and museum showings, Kieslowski’s epic series of 10 hour-long films, each based on one of the Ten Commandments, continues with two episodes. Episode VII, “Thou Shalt Not Steal,” raises the question of whether or not it’s…

Despite an energetic performance from Rushmore’s Jason Schwartzman and a flash of nudity from Pearl Harbor babe James King, Slackers sucks. There’s simply no one to like: Schwartzman’s lovesick nerd Ethan is revealed to be an obsessive psychopath, while the cool guys he must compete with for the love of…

It would be easy, and tempting, to hail Kandahar as a masterpiece without even seeing it: It’s a foreign film, it takes on social issues, it’s directed by Iranian master Mohsen Makhmalbaf, it speaks to the causes of our war on terror and first hit on U.S. shores right as…

Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down, based on reporter Mark Bowden’s factual account of a 1993 U.S. Army operation gone dreadfully awry in Somalia, doesn’t just kick your ass. It pummels your entire body; it leaves you trembling. Once the premise and setting are established, this brutal combat adventure doesn’t catch…

Ignore, if you can, the awful trailer for Dinner Rush, now playing in theaters and apparently struck from a grainy work print. Ignore also the simplistic analogies already being made to Big Night and The Sopranos, which prove only that critical quote-hustlers given to hyperbole have noticed the movie contains…

Novice screenwriter John Scott Shepherd was obviously paying attention in 1999. He no doubt noticed the massive mainstream and critical success of American Beauty and the cult followings of Fight Club and Office Space, and surely said to himself, “Hmmm, this whole thing about cubicle workers being full of pent-up…

If you can get past the fact that the central characters of Nickelodeon’s computer-animated feature Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius–the precocious, Chris Isaak-coiffed hero of the title (voiced by Debi Derryberry), his square suburban parents (Mark DeCarlo and Megan Cavanagh) and token, demographic-spanning friends–look like the kind of generic, Mexican-made bootleg…